hey 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 officers standing about him,--all
relapsing into vague gloom again at the withdrawal of the glass,--it
gave a feeling of childish delight. Yet it seemed only in keeping with
the whole enchantment of the scene; and had I been some Aladdin,
convoyed by genii or giants, I could hardly have felt more wholly a
denizen of some world of romance.

But the river was of difficult navigation; and we began to feel
sometimes, beneath the keel, that ominous, sliding, grating, treacherous
arrest of motion which makes the heart shudder, as the vessel does.
There was some solicitude about torpedoes, also,--a peril which became a
formidable thing, one year later, in the very channel where we found
none. Soon one of our consorts grounded, then another, every vessel
taking its turn, I believe, and then in turn getting off, until the
Norwich lay hopelessly stranded, for that tide at least, a few miles
below Jacksonville, and out of sight of the city, so that she could not
even add to our dignity by her visible presence from afar.

This was rather a serious matter, as the Norwich was our main naval
reliance, the Uncas being a