ut still
less faith in them. They were a sorry-looking lot, ragged and dirty; and
the first thing they asked for as they crowded about the kitchen door
was something to eat.

"Oh, missus, don't eber luf dem rebels take we uns away agin," was their
constant plea. "Dey 'buse us de wust you eber see. Dey whop us, an' dey
kick us, an' dey don't gib us half 'nough to eat. We all starve to def.
We been prayin' night an' day dat de Yankees may come an' shoot dat
place plum to pieces."

"But the trouble is that the Yankees can't do it," said Marcy, as he
bustled about in search of bread and meat to satisfy the demands of the
hungry blacks. "Captain Beardsley says the Island is too strong to be
captured."

The negroes confessed that they did not know much about military
matters, but they did know that there was much dissatisfaction among the
soldiers composing the garrison, many of whom declared that they would
make tracks for home as soon as their year was out, leaving the
Confederacy to gain its independence in any way it pleased. The Richmond
authorities would not help them, the people along the coast were too
cowardly or too lazy to shoulder a musket, and they were not going to
stay in the army and eat hard-tack while other able-bodied men stayed at
home and lived on the fat of the land. They would do their duty until
their term of enlistment expired, and then they would stand aside and
give somebody else a chance to fight the Yankees. That was what a good
many deluded and disappointed rebels thought and said about this time;
but those who have read "Rodney, the Partisan," know how very easy it
was for the Confederate authorities to bring such malcontents to their
senses.

But at last the time came when at least one of these vexed questions was
to be solved by a trial at arms. While the scenes we have attempted to
describe were being enacted on shore, others, that were of no less
interest and importance to Marcy Gray and the people who lived in and
around Nashville, were transpiring on the water. On the 11th day of
January a formidable military and naval expedition, consisting of more
than a hundred gunboats, transports, and supply ships, set sail from
Fortress Monroe. Its object was to obtain possession of Roanoke Island,
which the Confederates had spent so much time and care in fortifying,
and which their General Wise called "the key to all the rear defences of
Norfolk." Two days later the expedition arrived off Hatte