ays seems the most dreary symbol of the barbarism
of war, when one considers the national beneficence which reared and
kindled it. Despite the service rendered by this once brilliant light,
there were many wrecks which had been strown upon the beach, victims of
the most formidable of the Southern river-bars. As I stood with my foot
on the half-buried ribs of one of these vessels,--so distinctly traced
that one might almost fancy them human,--the old pilot, my companion,
told me the story of the wreck. The vessel had formerly been in the
Cuba trade; and her owner, an American merchant residing in Havana,
had christened her for his young daughter. I asked the name, and was
startled to recognize that of a favorite young cousin of mine, besides
the bones of whose representative I was thus strangely standing, upon
this lonely shore.

It was well to have something to relieve the anxiety naturally felt at
the delay of the John Adams,--anxiety both for her safety and for the
success of our enterprise, The Rebels had repeatedly threatened to
burn the whole of Jacksonville, in case of another attack, as they had
previously burned its mills and its great hotel. It seemed as if the
news of our arrival must surely have travelled thirty miles by this
time. All day we watched every smoke that rose among the wooded hills,
and consulted the compass and the map, to see if that sign announced the
doom of our expected home. At the very last moment of the tide, just
in time to cross the bar that day, the missing vessel arrived; all
anxieties vanished; I transferred my quarters on board, and at two the
next morning we steamed up the river.

Again there was the dreamy delight of ascending an unknown stream,
beneath a sinking moon, into a region where peril made fascination.
Since the time of the first explorers, I suppose that those Southern
waters have known no sensations so dreamy and so bewitching as those
which this war has brought forth. I recall, in this case, the faintest
sensations of our voyage, as Ponce de Leon may have recalled those
of his wandering search, in the same soft zone, for the secret of the
mystic fountain. I remember how, during that night, I looked for the
first time through a powerful night-glass. It had always seemed a thing
wholly inconceivable, that a mere lens could change darkness into light;
and as I turned the instrument on the preceding gunboat, and actually
discerned the man at the wheel and the others stan