nsisted of letters
from United States consuls abroad, forwarded through the State
Department, giving particulars of vessels fitting or loading for the
Confederacy or to break the blockade. "Nearly all my clerical force is
broken down," he writes on another occasion. "The fact is, I never saw
so much writing; and yet Drayton, who does as much as any of them, says
it is all necessary. So I tell them to go on. I do not mind signing my
name. Although I write all my own letters, some one has to copy them. My
fleet is so large now that it keeps us all at work the whole time."

But while he spoke thus lightly of his own share in these labors, the
confinement, the necessary attention to and study of larger details,
even while he intrusted the minor to others, and the unavoidable
anxieties of a man who had so many important irons in the fire, and at
the same time was approaching his sixty-fourth year, told upon him. To
this he bore witness when, after the capture of the Mobile forts, the
Department desired him to take command of the North Atlantic fleet, with
a view to the reduction of Wilmington, North Carolina. "They must think
I am made of iron," he wrote home. "I wrote the Secretary a long letter,
telling him that my health was not such as to justify my going to a new
station to commence new organizations; that I must have rest for my mind
and exercise for my body; that I had been down here within two months of
five years, out of six, and recently six months on constant blockade off
this port, _and my mind on the stretch all the time_; and now to
commence a blockade again on the Atlantic coast! Why, even the routine
of duty for a fleet of eighty sail of vessels works us all to death; and
but that I have the most industrious fleet-captain and secretary, it
would never be half done. It is difficult to keep things straight." "I
know," he writes on another occasion, "that few men could have gone
through what I have in the last three years, and no one ever will know
except yourself perhaps.... What the fight was to my poor brains,
neither you nor any one else will ever be able to comprehend. Six months
constantly watching day and night for an enemy; to know him to be as
brave, as skilful, and as determined as myself; who was pledged to his
Government and the South to drive me away and raise the blockade, and
free the Mississippi from our rule. While I was equally pledged to my
Government that I would capture or destroy the rebel."