ter he had acquired the
unpleasant features resulting from combat which the artist has cleverly
shown on opposite page.

General Butler said he found it almost impossible to avoid giving
offence to the foe, and finally he gave it up in despair.

The French are said to be the politest people on the face of the earth,
but no German will admit it; and though the Germans are known to have
big, warm, hospitable hearts, since the Franco-Prussian war you couldn't
get a Frenchman to admit this.

In February Burnside captured Roanoke Island, and the coast of North
Carolina fell into the hands of the Union army. Port Royal became the
base of operations against Florida, and at the close of the year 1862
every city on the Atlantic coast except Charleston, Wilmington, and
Savannah was held by the Union army.

[Illustration: UNPLEASANT FEATURES RESULTING FROM COMBAT.]

The Merrimac iron-clad, which had made much trouble for the Union
shipping for some time, steamed into Hampton Roads on the 8th of March.
Hampton Roads is not the Champs-Elysees of the South, but a long wet
stretch of track east of Virginia,--the Midway Plaisance of the Salted
Sea. The Merrimac steered for the Cumberland, rammed her, and the
Cumberland sunk like a stove-lid, with all on board. The captain of the
Congress, warned by the fate of the Cumberland, ran his vessel on shore
and tried to conceal her behind the tall grass, but the Merrimac
followed and shelled her till she surrendered.

The Merrimac then went back to Norfolk, where she boarded,
night having come on apace. In the morning she aimed to clear
out the balance of the Union fleet. That night, however, the
Monitor, a flat little craft with a revolving tower, invented by Captain
Ericsson, arrived, and in the morning when the Merrimac started in on
her day's work of devastation, beginning with the Minnesota, the
insignificant-looking Monitor slid up to the iron monster and gave her
two one-hundred-and-sixty-six-and-three-quarter-pound solid shot.

The Merrimac replied with a style of broadside that generally sunk her
adversary, but the balls rolled off the low flat deck and fell with a
solemn plunk in the moaning sea, or broke in fragments and lay on the
forward deck like the shells of antique eggs on the floor of the House
of Parliament after a Home Rule argument.

Five times the Merrimac tried to ram the little spitz-pup of the navy,
but her huge iron beak rode up over the slippery deck of the