ndictively,--the
cross of St. George,--flying from a British cutter.

By and by we come to our intrenchments upon the upper James and at
Bermuda Hundred. Now they are very listless and half empty. The boys
have gone off to tread on Lee's shanks. Only a few vessels stand at the
landings, and the few remnants have laid down the rifle, and taken up
the fishing-pole. One should come up this river to get a conception of
our splendid navy. Sharp-pointed gunboats, with bullet-proof crows'
nests and swivels that are the gentlest murderers ever polished;
monitors through whose eyeholes a ball a big as a cook-stove squints
from a columbiad socket; ferry-boats which are speckled with brass
cannon, and all sorts of craft that can float and manoeuvre, provided
they look at us through deadly muzzles are there to the number of fifty
or sixty, as many as make the entire navies of all other American
nations. After the war we must have a great naval review, and invite all
the crowned heads to attend it. Soon we reach Dutch Gap, where lies
Butler's canal, or "Butler's gut," as the sailors call it. The river at
this point is so crooked that Butler must have laid it out by the aid of
his wrong eye. The canal is meant to cut on a long elbow; but being
almost at right angles to the course of the river, only the most
obliging tide would run through it. As a consequence, it is a sort of a
sluice merely, of insufficient width, and as a "sight" very
disappointing to great expectations. Between the points of debouch of
this canal crosses a drawbridge of pontoons, for the use of our troops,
and just beyond it Aiken's Landing, where the flag of truce boat
stopped. A fine brick mansion stands in shore, with a wharf abreast it.
The banks around it are trodden here with many feet. These are the
traces of the poor prisoners who reached here, fevered, and starving and
naked, to catch for the first time the sight of cool waters and friends,
and the bright flag which they had followed to the edge of the grave.
How they threw up their hats, and cheered to the feeblest, and wept, and
danced, and laughed. Long be the place remembered, as holy, neutral
ground, where death never trod, and multitudes passed from suffering, to
freedom and home. Beyond this point, the most formidable Rebel works we
have seen, line the high bluffs and ridges. They are monuments of
patient labor, and make of themselves hills as great as nature's. But
the siege pieces, which often be