e particulars.
Forwarding these hastily to Beaufort (for we had then no telegraph), I
was soon at the scene of action, five miles away. Approaching, I met on
the picket paths man after man who had escaped from the wreck across
a half-mile of almost impassable marsh. Never did I see such
objects,--some stripped to their shirts, some fully clothed, but all
having every garment literally pasted to them--bodies with mud. Across
the river, the Rebels were retiring, having done their work, but were
still shelling, from greater and greater distances, the wood through
which I rode. Arrived at the spot nearest the wreck (a point opposite to
what we called the Brickyard Station), I saw the burning vessel aground
beyond a long stretch of marsh, out of which the forlorn creatures were
still floundering. Here and there in the mud and reeds we could see the
laboring heads, slowly advancing, and could hear excruciating cries from
wounded men in the more distant depths. It was the strangest mixture of
war and Dante and Robinson Crusoe. Our energetic chaplain coming up, I
sent him with four men, under a flag of truce, to the place whence the
worst cries proceeded, while I went to another part of the marsh. During
that morning we got them all out, our last achievement being the
rescue of the pilot, an immense negro with a wooden leg,--an article so
particularly unavailable for mud travelling, that it would have almost
seemed better, as one of the men suggested, to cut the traces, and leave
it behind.

A naval gunboat, too, which had originally accompanied this vessel, and
should never have left it, now came back and took off the survivors,
though there had been several deaths from scalding and shell. It
proved that the wreck was not aground after all, but at anchor, having
foolishly lingered till after daybreak, and having thus given time
for the enemy to bring down then: guns. The first shot had struck the
boiler, and set the vessel on fire; after which the officer in command
had raised a white flag, and then escaped with his men to our shore; and
it was for this flight in the wrong direction that they were shelled
in the marshes by the Rebels. The case furnished in this respect some
parallel to that of the Kearsage and Alabama, and it was afterwards
cited, I believe, officially or unofficially, to show that the Rebels
had claimed the right to punish, in this case, the course of action
which they approved in Semmes. I know that they alw