n officer with his left hand, his
right arm having been rendered useless by his mortal wound. For ink he
used his own life blood.

Also in the museum may be seen the chart-book of Blackbeard, the pirate,
who, one of the curators of the museum informed me, was the same person
as Edward Teach. Blackbeard, who is commemorated in the name of
Blackbeard's Island, off the coast of South Georgia, met his fate when
he encountered a cruiser fitted out by Governor Spotswood of Virginia
and commanded by Lieutenant Maynard. Maynard found Blackbeard's ship at
Okracoke Inlet, on the North Carolina coast. Before he and his men could
board the pirate vessel the pirates came and boarded them. Severe
fighting ensued, but the pirates were defeated, Maynard himself killing
Blackbeard in single combat with swords. The legend around Okracoke is
that Blackbeard's bad fortune on this occasion came to him because of
the unlucky number of his matrimonial adventures, the story being that
he had thirteen wives. It is said also that his vanquishers cut off his
head and hung it at the yard-arm of their ship, throwing his body into
the sea, and that as soon as the body struck the water the head began to
call, "Come on, Edward!" whereupon the headless body swam three times
around the ship. Personally I think there may be some slight doubt about
the authenticity of this part of the story. For, while from one point of
view we might say that to swim about in such aimless fashion would be
the very thing a man without a head might do, yet from another point of
view the question arises: Would a man whose head had just been severed
from his body feel like taking such a long swim?

And what a rich lot of other historic treasures!

Did you know, for instance, that Flora Macdonald, the Scottish heroine,
who helped Prince Charles Edward to escape, dressed as a maidservant,
after the Battle of Culloden, in 1746, came to America with her husband
and many relatives just before the Revolutionary War and settled at
Cross Creek (now Fayetteville), North Carolina? When General Donald
Macdonald raised the Royal standard at the time of the Revolution, her
husband and many of her kinsmen joined him, and these were later
captured at the Battle of Moore's Creek Bridge, in 1776, and taken as
prisoners to Philadelphia. Yes; and Flora Macdonald's garter-buckles are
now in the museum at Raleigh.

A portrait of Captain James J. Waddell, C.S.N., who was a member of a
famous N