ding in Minneapolis, Minnesota,

who is always
"On the Blockade" against Melancholy, "The Blues,"
and all similar maladies,

This Volume
is affectionately dedicated.

PREFACE

"ON THE BLOCKADE" is the third of "The Blue and the Gray Series." Like
the first and second volumes, its incidents are dated back to the War
of the Rebellion, and located in the midst of its most stirring scenes
on the Southern coast, where the naval operations of the United States
contributed their full share to the final result.

The writer begs to remind his readers again that he has not felt called
upon to invest his story with the dignity of history, or in all cases
to mingle fiction with actual historic occurrences. He believes that all
the scenes of the story are not only possible, but probable, and that
just such events as he has narrated really and frequently occurred in
the days of the Rebellion.

The historian is forbidden to make his work more palatable or more
interesting by the intermixture of fiction with fact, while the
story-writer, though required to be reasonably consistent with the
spirit and the truth of history, may wander from veritable details, and
use his imagination in the creation of incidents upon which the grand
result is reached. It would not be allowable to make the Rebellion a
success, if the writer so desired, even on the pages of romance; and it
would not be fair or just to ignore the bravery, the self-sacrifice, and
the heroic endurance of the Southern people in a cause they believed to
be holy and patriotic, as almost universally admitted at the present
time, any more than it would be to lose sight of the magnificent spirit,
the heroism, the courage, and the persistence, of the Northern people in
accomplishing what they believed then, and still believe, was a holy and
patriotic duty in the preservation of the Union.

Incidents not inconsistent with the final result, or with the spirit
of the people on either side in the great conflict are of comparatively
little consequence. That General Lee or General Grant turned this or
that corner in reaching Appomattox may be important, but the grand
historical tableau is the Christian hero, noble in the midst of defeat,
disaster, and ruin, formally rendering his sword to the impassible but
magnanimous conqueror as the crowning event of a long and bloody war.
The details are historically important, tho