A good soldier never separates from his baggage," said
the colonel, gruffly, on hearing the excuse. After various adventures,
common to missing personal effects, the lieutenant's trunks turned up
at Port Royal. He looked sympathetically at the colonel's shorn plumes
and meagre array, and said, reproachfully, "Colonel, where are your
trunks? A good soldier should never separate from his baggage." But,
doubtless, to follow it to the bottom of the sea would be an excess of
zeal.

Not long afterwards I was shipmate with an assistant surgeon who had
been detailed for duty on board the _Governor_, and had passed through
the scenes of anxiety and confusion preceding the rescue. He told me
one or two amusing incidents. An order being given to lighten the
ship, four marines ran into the cabin where he was lying, seized a
marble-top table, dropped the marble top on deck, and threw the wooden
legs overboard. There was also on board a very young naval officer,
barely out of the Academy. He was of Dutch blood and name--from
central Pennsylvania, I think. Although without much experience, he
was of the constitutionally self-possessed order, which enabled him to
be very useful. After a good deal of exertion, he also came into the
cabin. The surgeon asked him how things looked. "I think she will last
about half an hour," he replied, and then composedly lay down and went
to sleep.

There was in the hero of this anecdote a vein of eccentricity even
then, and he eventually died insane and young. I knew him only
slightly, but familiarly as to face. He had mild blue eyes and curly
brown hair, with a constant half-smile in eyes as well as mouth. In
temperament he was Dutch to the backbone--at least as we imagine
Dutch. A comical anecdote was told me of him a few years later,
illustrating his self-possession--cool to impudence. He was serving on
one of our big steam-sloops, a flag-ship at the time, and had charge
of working the cables on the gun-deck when anchoring. Going into a
port where the water was very deep--Rio de Janeiro, I believe--the
chain cables "got away," as the expression is; control was lost, and
shackle after shackle tore out of the hawse-holes, leaping and
thumping, rattling and roaring, stirring a lot of dust besides.
Indeed, the violent friction of iron against iron in such cases not
infrequently generates a stream of sparks. The weight of twenty
fathoms of this linked iron mass hanging outside, aided by the
momentum al