heels in my head and see the chips
fly. Meantime, our captain went to London, having completed his
official visiting, and an English captain came on board to return a
call. Declining my invitation to enter the cabin, he walked up and
down the quarter-deck with me, discussing many things; under his arm
his sword. Suddenly he stopped short, and pointing with it to a big
iron-strapped leading-block, he said, "Now that is what I call a
sensible block; I wonder why it is we cannot get blocks like that in
our ships." I was not prepared with a reason for their defects, then
or since; but my unreadiness has not marred my enjoyment of these
divergent points of view. Perhaps the captain was a professional
malcontent; for, looking at a Parrott rifled hundred-pounder gun which
we carried on the quarter-deck, he said, interrogatively, "Not
breech-loading?" "No," I answered, "breech-loading is not in favor
with us at present." "And very right you are," he rejoined. I think
they then (1863) still had the Armstrong breech-loading system. This
incident may deserve a place in the palaeontology of gun-making. There
are now, I presume, no muzzle-loaders left; unless in museums, as
specimens.

Very shortly after the _Macedonian's_ return home I was sent to New
Orleans, for a ship on the Texas blockade; transportation being given
me on one of the "beef-boats," as the supply-vessels were familiarly
known. Among fellow-passengers was one of my class; for a while,
indeed, my room-mate at the Academy. When we reached New Orleans the
chief of staff said to me, "There is a vacancy on board the
_Monongahela_," a ship larger and in every way better than the
_Seminole_ to which I was ordered; moreover, she was lying off Mobile,
a sociable blockade, instead of at a jumping-off place, the end of
nowhere, Sabine Pass, where the _Seminole_ was. He advised me to apply
for her, which I did; but Commodore Bell, acting in Farragut's absence
in the North, declined. I must go to the ship to which the Department
had assigned me, and for which it doubtless had its reasons. So my
classmate was ordered to her instead, and on board her was killed in
the passage of the Mobile forts the following August. I can scarcely
claim a miraculous escape, as it does not appear that I should have
got in the way of the ball which finished him; but for him, poor
fellow, who had not been long married, the commodore's refusal to me
was a sentence of death.

I shall not attempt t