ost unopposed march showed
the weakness of the whole country. Even strangers like myself were so
carried away with the enthusiasm of the moment, that we shut our eyes to
what should have been clearly manifest to us. We could not believe that
men who were fighting and enduring as these men were could ever be
beaten. Some of their leaders must have foreseen that the catastrophe
was coming months before it occurred; but, if they did so, they were
afraid to make their opinion public.

On returning to the hotel, I found it full of people of all classes
indulging in tobacco (the only solace left them) in every form. It is
all very well to say that smoking is a vile habit; so it may be, when
indulged in by luxurious fellows who eat and drink their full every day,
and are rarely without a cigar or pipe in their mouths; it may, perhaps,
be justly said that such men abuse the use of the glorious narcotic
supplied by Providence for men's consolation under difficulties. But
when a man has hard mental and bodily work, and barely enough food to
support nature, water being his only drink, then give him tobacco, and
he will thoroughly appreciate it. Besides, it will do him real good. I
think that at any time its use in moderation is harmless and often
beneficial, but under the circumstances I speak of it is a luxury
without price.

During the evening I met at the hotel a Confederate naval officer who
was going to attempt that night to carry havoc among the blockading
squadron by means of a cigar-shaped vessel of a very curious
description.

This vessel was a screw steamer of sixty feet in length, with eight feet
beam. She lay, before being prepared for the important service on which
she was going, with about two feet of her hull showing above the water,
at each end of which, on the shoulder as it were of the cigar, was a
small hatch or opening, just large enough to allow a man to pop through
it: from her bows projected a long iron outrigger, at the end of which
there was fixed a torpedo that would explode on coming into contact with
a vessel's side.

When the crew were on board, and had gone down into the vessel through
one of the hatches above mentioned, the said hatches were firmly closed,
and by arrangements that were made from the inside the vessel was sunk
about six inches below the water, leaving merely a small portion of the
funnel showing. Steam and smoke being got rid of below water, the vessel
was invisible, torpedo and