inning of the war,
and labored at incessantly until captured. Behind these every one of the
thirty-four miles to Wilmington was covered with the fire of the best
guns the English arsenals could produce, mounted on forts built at every
advantageous spot. Lines of piles running out into the water, forced
incoming vessels to wind back and forth across the stream under the
point-blank range of massive Armstrong rifles. As if this were not
sufficient, the channel was thickly studded with torpedoes that would
explode at the touch of the keel of a passing vessel. These abundant
precautions, and the telegram from General Lee, found in Fort Fisher,
stating that unless that stronghold and Fort Caswell were held he could
not hold Richmond, give some idea of the importance of the place to the
Rebels.

We passed groups of hundreds of sailors fishing for torpedos, and saw
many of these dangerous monsters, which they had hauled up out of the
water. We caught up with the "Thorn," when about half way to the sea,
passed her, to our great delight, and soon left a gap between us of
nearly half-a-mile. We ran through an opening in the piling, holding up
close to the left side, and she apparently followed our course exactly.
Suddenly there was a dull roar; a column of water, bearing with it
fragments of timbers, planking and human bodies, rose up through one side
of the vessel, and, as it fell, she lurched forward and sank. She had
struck a torpedo. I never learned the number lost, but it must have been
very great.

Some little time after this happened we approached Fort Anderson, the
most powerful of the works between Wilmington and the forts at the mouth
of the sea. It was built on the ruins of the little Town of Brunswick,
destroyed by Cornwallis during the Revolutionary War. We saw a monitor
lying near it, and sought good positions to view this specimen of the
redoubtable ironclads of which we had heard and read so much. It looked
precisely as it did in pictures, as black, as grim, and as uncompromising
as the impregnable floating fortress which had brought the "Merrimac" to
terms.

But as we approached closely we noticed a limpness about the smoke stack
that seemed very inconsistent with the customary rigidity of cylindrical
iron. Then the escape pipe seemed scarcely able to maintain itself
upright. A few minutes later we discovered that our terrible Cyclops of
the sea was a flimsy humbug, a theatrical imitation, made by