ormed during the evening, and the bride and groom
accompanied her with a song. It was the popular Federal parody of "Gay
and Happy:"

"Then let the South fling aloft what it will,--
We are for the Union still!
For the Union! For the Union!
We are for the Union still!"

The bride and groom sang alternate stanzas, and the concourse of
soldiers, civilians, and females swelled the chorus. The reserve being
thus broken, the young officer sang the "Star-Spangled Banner," and the
refrain must have called up the mermaids. Dancing ensued, and a soldier
volunteered a hornpipe. A young man with an astonishing compass of lungs
repeated something from Shakespeare, and the night passed by gleefully
and reputably. One could hardly realize, in the cheerful eyes and active
figures of the dance, the sad uncertainties of the time. Youth trips
lightest, somehow, on the brink of the grave.

The hilarities of the evening so influenced the German quartered with
me, that he sang snatches of foreign ballads during most of the night,
and obliged me, at last, to call the steward and insist upon his good
behavior.

In the gray of the morning I ventured on deck, and, following the
silvery line of beach, made out the shipping at anchor in Hampton Roads.
The _Minnesota_ flag-ship lay across the horizon, and after a time I
remarked the low walls and black derricks of the Rip Raps. The white
tents at Hampton were then revealed, and finally I distinguished
Fortress Monroe, the key of the Chesapeake, bristling with guns, and
floating the Federal flag. As we rounded to off the quay, I studied with
intense interest the scene of so many historic events. Sewall's Point
lay to the south, a stretch of woody beach, around whose western tip
the dreaded _Merrimac_ had so often moved slowly to the encounter. The
spars of the _Congress_ and the _Cumberland_ still floated along the
strand, but, like them, the invulnerable monster had become the prey of
the waves. The guns of the Rip Raps and the terrible broadsides of the
Federal gunboats, had swept the Confederates from Sewall's Point,--their
flag and battery were gone,--and farther seaward, at Willoughby Spit,
some figures upon the beach marked the route of the victorious Federals
to the city of Norfolk.

The mouth of the James and the York were visible from the deck, and long
lines of shipping stretched from each to the Fortress. The quay itself
was like the pool in the Thames, a mass o