I should have
little to say of the submarine diving during the bay-fight.

The harbor of Mobile is shaped like a rude Innuit boot. At the top,
Tensaw and Mobile Rivers, in their deltas, make, respectively, two
and three looplike bands, like the straps. The toe is Bonsecour
Bay, pointing east. The heel rests on Dauphin Island, while the main
channel flows into the hollow of the foot between Fort Morgan and
Dauphin Island. In the north-west angle, obscured by the foliage,
lay the devoted city, suffering no less from artificial famine, made
unnecessarily, than the ligatures that stopped the vital current of
trade. Tons of meat were found putrefying while the citizens, and
even the garrison, had been starving on scanty rations. Food could
be purchased, but at exorbitant rates, and the medium of exchange,
Confederate notes, all gone to water and waste paper. The true story
of the Lost Cause has yet to be written. North of Mobile, in the
Trans-Mississippi department, thousands whose every throb was devoted
to the enterprise, welcomed the Northern invaders, not as destroyers
of a hope already dead by the act of a few entrusted with its defence,
but as something better than the anarchy that was not Southern
independence or anything else human.

Such were the condition, period and place--the people crushed
between the upper and nether millstones of two hostile and contending
civilizations--when native thrift evoked a new element, that set
in sharp contrast the heroism of life and the heroism of death, the
courage that incurs danger to save against the courage that
accepts danger to destroy. The work was the saving of the valuable
arms--costing the government thirty thousand dollars per gun--and the
machinery of the sunken Milwaukee.[A] By a curious circumstance this
party of divers was composed partly, if not principally or entirely,
of mechanics and engineers who were exempt from military service
under the economic laws of the Confederacy, yet who in heart and soul
sympathized with the rebellion. They had worked to save for the South:
now they were to work and save for the North. It was a service of
superadded danger. All the peril incurred from missile weapons
was increased by the hidden danger of the secret under-sea and the
presence of the terrible torpedoes. These floated everywhere, in all
innocent, unsuspicious shapes. One monster, made of boiler iron, a
huge cross, is popularly believed to be still hidden in the bay. T