l government; but the site of their
crowning glory was now the scene of their children's shame. Discord had
stolen upon their councils and blood had profaned their shrine.

I visited next day a bomb-proof postern, or subterranean passage,
connecting the citadel with the outworks, and loitered about the
fortifications till noon, when I took passage on the mail steamer, which
left the Fortress at eleven o'clock, and reached White House at dusk the
same evening. The whole river as I ascended was filled with merchant and
naval craft. They made a continuous line from Old Point to the mouth of
York River, and the masts and spars environing Yorktown and Gloucester,
reminded one of a scene on the Mersey or the Clyde. At West Point, there
was an array of shipping scarcely less formidable, and the windings of
the interminably crooked Pamunkey were marked for leagues by sails,
smoke-stacks, and masts. The landings and wharves were besieged by
flat-boats and sloops, and Zouaves were hoisting forage and commissary
stores up the red bluffs at every turn of our vessel.

The Pamunkey was a beautiful stream, densely wooded, and occasional
vistas opened up along its borders of wheat-fields and meadows, with
Virginia farm-houses and negro quarters on the hilltops. Some of the
houses on the river banks appeared to be tenanted by white people, but
the majority had a haunted, desolate appearance, the only signs of life
being strolling soldiers, who thrust their legs through the second story
windows, or contemplated the river from the chimney-tops, and groups of
negroes who sunned themselves on the piazza, or rushed to the margin to
gaze and grin at the passing steamers. There were occasional residences
not unworthy of old manorial and baronial times, and these were attended
at a little distance by negro quarters of logs, arranged in rows, and
provided with mud chimneys built against their gables. Few of the
Northern navigable rivers were so picturesque and varied.

We passed two Confederate gunboats, that had been half completed, and
burned on the stocks. Their charred elbows and ribs, stared out, like
the remains of some extinct monsters; a little delay might have found
each of them armed and manned, and carrying havoc upon the rivers and
the seas. West Point was simply a tongue, or spit of land, dividing the
Mattapony from the Pamunkey river at their junction; a few houses were
built upon the shallow, and some wharves, half demolished, ma