een broken out from its regular seat at
Annapolis and transferred for the moment to Newport. All the
arrangements were temporary and extemporized. The principal
establishment, housing the three older classes, was in a building in
the town formerly known as the Atlantic Hotel; while the new entries,
who were very numerous, were quartered on two sailing-frigates, moored
head and stern in the inner harbor, off Goat Island. This duplex
arrangement necessitated a double set of officers, not easy to be had
with war going on; the more so that the original corps had been
depleted by the resignations of Southern men. The embarrassment
arising from the immediate scantness of officers led naturally, if
perhaps somewhat irreflectively, to a great number of admissions to
the Naval Academy, disregardful of past experience with the '41 Date,
and of the future, when room at the top would be lacking to take in
all these youngsters as captains and admirals. Thus was constituted
the "hump," as it came to be called, which, like a tumor on the body,
engaged at a later day the attention of many professional
practitioners. As it would not absorb, and as the rough-and-ready
methods by which civil life and the survival of the fittest deal with
such conditions could not be applied, it had to be dissipated; a
process ultimately carried out with indifferent success. While it
lasted it caused many a heartache from postponement. As one of the
sufferers said, when hearing the matter discussed, "I don't know about
this or that. All I know is that I have been a lieutenant for twenty
years." Owing to the slimness of the service in the lower grades they
became lieutenants young; but there they stuck. Every boom is followed
by such reaction, and for a military service war is a boom. Expansion
sets in; and when contraction follows somebody is squeezed. At the end
of the Napoleonic Wars there were over eight hundred post-captains in
the British navy. What could peace do for them?

Eight pleasant months I spent on shore at the Academy, and then was
again whisked off to sea, there to remain for substantially all the
rest of the war. Although already prominent as a fashionable
watering-place, Newport then was very far from its present
development; but in winter it had a settled and pleasant, if small,
society. At this time I met the widow of Captain Lawrence of the
_Chesapeake_, who survived until two years later. She was already
failing, and not prematurely;