ver the poor highways in
continuous streams between New England and the Southern coast towns.
This awkward result of the blockade moved the sense of humor of the
Yankee rhymsters who placarded the wagons with such mottoes as "Free
Trade and Oxen's Rights" and parodied _Ye Mariners of England_ with the
lines:

Ye wagoners of Freedom
Whose chargers chew the cud,
Whose wheels have braved a dozen years
The gravel and the mud;
Your glorious hawbucks yoke again
To take another jag,
And scud through the mud
Where the heavy wheels do drag,
Where the wagon creak is long and low
And the jaded oxen lag.

Columbia needs no wooden walls,
No ships where billows swell;
Her march is like a terrapin's,
Her home is in her shell.
To guard her trade and sailor's rights,
In woods she spreads her flag.

Such ribald nonsense, however, was unfair to a navy which had done
magnificently well until smothered and suppressed by sheer weight of
numbers. It was in January, 1815, that Captain Decatur finally sailed
out of New York harbor in the hope of taking the _President_ past the
blockading division which had been driven offshore by a heavy northeast
gale. The British ships were struggling back to their stations when they
spied the Yankee frigate off the southern coast of Long Island. It was a
stern chase, Decatur with a hostile squadron at his heels and unable to
turn and fight because the odds were hopeless. The frigate _Endymion_
was faster than her consorts and, as she came up alone, the _President_
delayed to exchange broadsides before fleeing again with every sail set.
Her speed had been impaired by stranding as she came out past Sandy
Hook, else she might have out-footed the enemy. But soon the _Pomone_
and the _Tenedos_, frigates of the class of the _Shannon_ and the
_Guerriere_, were in the hunt. Decatur was cornered, but his guns were
served until a fifth of the crew were disabled, the ship was crippled,
and a force fourfold greater than his own was closing in to annihilate
him at its leisure. "I deemed it my duty to surrender," said he, and a
noble American frigate, more formidable than the _Constitution_, was
added to the list of the Royal Navy.

[Illustration: _A FRIGATE OF 1812 UNDER SAIL_

The _Constellation_, of which this is a photograph, is somewhat smaller
than the _Constitution_, being rated at 38 guns as against 44 for the
latter. In general appearance, however, and particularly in