y most intimate friends; and in 1864 they attempted to blow up the
_Wabash_, and myself along with it. The _Cairo_ business was caused by
sunk torpedoes. She was going up the Yazoo river at the time, and had
lowered a boat to search for torpedoes, which were known to be sunk
there. They succeeded in fishing up one, which was found to be an
exploded one. Meanwhile the _Cairo_, having got rather too close in
shore, backed out towards the middle of the stream, when two explosions
occurred in quick succession, one close to the port-quarter, the other
under the port-bow. The effect was tremendous. Some of the heavy guns
were actually lifted from the deck. The captain instantly shoved the
_Cairo_ on the bank, and got a hawser out to a tree to keep her, if
possible, from sinking in deep water. The pumps, steam and hand, were
set going immediately; but her whole frame, ironclad though she was, had
been so shattered, that nothing could save her. Twelve minutes
afterwards she slipped down into six fathoms water, giving them barely
time to get out the boats and save the sick men aboard, and the arms.
My friend was one of the sick, and the moving was ultimately the death
of him, though no lives were lost at the time."

"You're not tellin' me crackers, are you?" said Lancey, in an
incredulous tone.

"My good fellow," returned the skipper, "I wish that I were. The story
is only too true, and I would it were the only one of the sort I had to
tell. You can find a book in London, [see note 1] if you like, which
tells all about this and the other torpedo work done during the late
American war."

"Well, then," said Lancey, in the tone of an eager listener, while, by
the tapping on the combings of the hatchway, I could distinguish that he
was emptying his pipe, with a view, no doubt, to the enjoyment of
another, "and what happened when they tried to blow _you_ up?"

"Well, you must know," resumed the skipper, "it was long afterwards,
near the end of the war. I was in the US steamer _Wabash_ at the time.
We were at anchor off Charleston, and we kept a sharp look-out at that
time, for it was a very different state of things from the wooden-wall
warfare that Nelson used to carry on. Why, we never turned in a night
without a half sort of expectation of being blown into the sky before
morning. It was uneasy work, too, for although American sailors are as
good at _facing_ death as any men, they don't like the notion of death
co