enough, only he seemed to have seen "mighty little,"
which, I suppose, should be spelled "mity little." When we said this,
Ingham said it was all in the dark, and Haliburton added, that "the
battle-lanterns were as bad as they could be," Ingham said, however,
that he thought there was more somewhere,--he had often heard the old
gentleman tell the story in vastly more detail.

Accordingly, a few days after, he sent me a yellow old letter on long
foolscap sheets, in which the old gentleman had written out his
recollections for Ingham's own benefit, after some talk of old times on
Thanksgiving evening. It is all he has ever found in his grandfather's
rather tedious papers about the battle, and one passing allusion in it
drops the curtain on Denis Duval.

Here it is.

"JAMAICA PLAIN, NOV. 29, 1824.

"MY DEAR BOY,--I am very glad to comply with your request
about an account of the great battle between the Serapis and the
Bon Homme Richard and her consort. I had rather you should write
out what I told you all on Thanksgiving evening at your mother's,
for you hold a better pen than I do. But I know my memory of the
event is strong, for it was the first fight I ever saw; and
although it does not compare with Rodney's great fight with De
Grasse, which I saw also, yet there are circumstances connected
with it which will always make it a remarkable fight in history.

"You said, at your mother's, that you had never understood why the
men on each side kept inquiring if the others had struck. The
truth is, we had it all our own way below. And, as it proved, when
our captain, Pearson, struck, most of his men were below. I know,
that, in all the confusion and darkness and noise, I had no idea,
aft on the main deck, that we were like to come off second best.
On the other hand, at that time, the Richard probably had not a
man left between-decks, unless some whom they were trying to keep
at her pumps. But on her upper deck and quarter-deck and in her
tops she had it all her own way. Jones himself was there; by that
time Dale was there; and they had wholly cleared our upper deck,
as we had cleared their main deck and gun-room. This was the
strangeness of that battle. We were pounding through and through
her, while she did not fight a gun of her main battery. But Jones
was working his quarter-deck guns so as almost to rake our deck