iron beak,
or ram, and she carries ten guns. On the whole, she's the ugliest beauty
that you ever saw! She's almost ready to send to Davy Jones's locker a
Yankee ship or two. Commodore Buchanan commands her, and you know who he
is! She's got her full quota of officers, and, the speaker excepted,
they're as fine a set as you'll find on the high seas! But man-of-war's
men are scarcer, my friends, than hen's teeth! It's what comes of having
no maritime population. Every man Jack that isn't on our few little
ships is in the army--and the Virginia wants a crew of three hundred of
the bravest of the brave! Now, I am talking to Virginians and
Louisianians. Many of you are from New Orleans, and that means that some
of you may very well have been seamen--seamen at an emergency, anyhow!
Anyhow, when it comes to an emergency Virginians and Louisianians are
there to meet it--on sea or on land! Just now there is an emergency--the
Virginia's got to have a crew. General Magruder, for all he's got only a
small force with which to hold a long line--General Magruder, like the
patriot that he is, has said that I may ask this morning for volunteers.
Men! any seaman among you has the chance to gather laurels from the
strangest deck of the strangest ship that ever you saw! No fear for the
laurels! They're fresh and green even under our belching smokestack. The
Merrimac is up like the phoenix; and the last state of her is greater
than the first, and her name is going down in history! Louisianians and
Virginians, who volunteers?'

"About two hundred volunteered--"

"Edward, what did you know about seamanship?"

"Precious little. Chiefly, Unity, what you have read to me from novels.
But the laurels sounded enticing, and I was curious about the ship.
Well, Wood chose about eighty--all who had been seamen or gunners and a
baker's dozen of ignoramuses beside. I came in with that portion of the
elect. And off we went, in boats, across the James to the southern shore
and to the Gosport Navy Yard. That was a week before the battle."

"What does it look like, Edward--the Merrimac?"

"It looks, Judith, like Hamlet's cloud. Sometimes there is an appearance
of a barn with everything but the roof submerged--or of Noah's Ark,
three fourths under water! Sometimes, when the flag is flying, she has
the air of a piece of earthworks, mysteriously floated off into the
river. Ordinarily, though, she is rather like a turtle, with a chimney
sticking up from he