flat
flooring with no motion beyond an occasional faint bumping. The tugboat
Aid, half a mile ahead of us, cast off from the vessel which it was
taking out, and came to our assistance. Apparently it had been engaged
during the night in watching the harbor; for on deck stood a score of
volunteers in gray overcoats, while the naval-looking personage with
grizzled whiskers who seemed to command was the same Lieutenant Coste
who transferred the revenue-cutter Aiken from the service of the United
States to that of South Carolina. The Aid took hold of us, broke a large
new hawser after a brief struggle, and then went up to the city to
report our condition.

The morning was lowery, with driving showers running through it from
time to time, and an atmosphere penetratingly damp and cheerless. On the
beach two companies of volunteers were drilling in the rain, no doubt
getting an appetite for breakfast. Without uniforms, their trousers
tucked into their boots, and here and there a white blanket fastened
shawl-like over the shoulders, they looked, as one of our passengers
observed, like a party of returned Californians. Their line was uneven,
their wheeling excessively loose, their evolutions of the simplest and
yet awkwardly executed. Evidently they were newly embodied, and from the
country; for the Charleston companies are spruce in appearance and well
drilled. Half a dozen of them, who had been on sentinel duty during the
night, discharged their guns in the air,--a daily process, rendered
necessary by the moist atmosphere of the harbor at this season; and
then, the exercise being over, there was a general scamper for the
shelter of a neighboring cottage, low-roofed and surrounded by a veranda
after the fashion of Sullivan's Island. Within half an hour they
reappeared in idle squads, and proceeded to kill the heavy time
by staring at us as we stared at them. One individual, learned in
sea-phrase, insulted our misfortune by bawling, "Ship ahoy!" A fellow
in a red shirt, who looked more like a Bowery _bhoy_ than like a
Carolinian, hailed the captain to know if he might come aboard;
whereupon he was surrounded by twenty others, who appeared to
question him and confound him until he thought it best to disappear
unostentatiously. I conjectured that he was a hero of Northern birth,
who had concluded to run away, if he could do it safely.

When we tired of the volunteers, we looked at the harbor and its
inanimate surroundings. A ship