now sail after sail hove in sight, all making their way as best
they could towards the inlet. This some reached, and got safely in before
night. Others, attempting to enter, got aground, and were with difficulty
got off again. Some anchored outside, and some lay off and on, waiting
for morning, to be piloted past the shoals, and through the narrow
channel, to a safe anchorage inside.

XV.

HATTERAS INLET.

But what a morning dawned! Another storm, more terrible than the first,
had been raging all night, and its violence was still increasing. And now
it came on to rain; and rain and wind and sea appeared to vie with each
other in wreaking their fury on the ill-starred expedition.

Tuesday night the storm abated, and Wednesday brought fair weather. The
fleet in the mean time had suffered perils and hardships which can never
be told. Many of the transports were still missing. Many were at anchor
outside the inlet, waiting for pilots to bring them in. Some had been
lost. The "City of New York," a large steam propeller, freighted with
stores and munitions of war, had struck on the bar, and foundered in the
breakers. The crew, after clinging for twenty-four hours in the rigging
to avoid being washed off by the sea, which made a clean breach over her,
had been saved, but vessel and cargo were a total loss. Frank had watched
the wreck, which seemed at one moment to emerge from the waves, and the
next was half hidden by the incoming billows, and enveloped in a white
shroud of foam.

The schooner had escaped the dangers of the sea, and was safe at last
inside the inlet; as safe, at least, as any of the fleet, in so
precarious an anchorage.

There was still another formidable bar to pass before the open waters of
Pamlico Sound could be entered. The transports that had got in were lying
in a basin, full of shoals, with but little room to swing with the tide,
and they were continually running into each other, or getting aground.
Nor was it encouraging to see bales of hay from one of the wrecks lodge
at low water upon the very sand-bar which the fleet had still to cross.

Frank and his comrades took advantage of the fair weather to make
observation of the two forts, Hatteras and Clark, which command the
situation. These were constructed by the rebels, but had been captured
from them by General Butler and Commodore Stringham, in August, 1861, and
were now garri