bundle under his arm, the executive officer, thinking that it was his
clothes-bag, told him that that was no time to be trying to save his
effects. He said nothing, but threw it into the boat. When the bundle
was passed up over the side of the _Rhode Island_ it proved to be a
little messenger-boy--probably the smallest and youngest one in the
service. The three boats were finally loaded and made their way back to
the ship.

In the mean while the _Rhode Island_, in backing her engines, had fouled
the hawser with her port paddle-wheel, and being directly to windward of
the _Monitor_, with her engines helpless, drifted down upon her. It
looked at one time as if she would strike the bow of the _Monitor_, but,
fortunately, she just missed it, and, scraping along her side, drifted
off to leeward.

Another boat was sent to bring off the remainder of the _Monitor's_
crew, but, being to leeward now, she could make only slow headway
against the seas, and before she got to her the men saw the _Monitor's_
light disappear, and knew that she had gone down. The hawser having
finally been cleared from the _Rhode Island's_ wheel, she steamed around
searching for the boat, sending up rockets and burning blue lights to
show her position. When the day dawned nothing could be seen. After
hailing a passing government vessel and telling them to search for the
boat, the _Rhode Island_ steamed with all speed for Fortress Monroe to
report the loss.

When the survivors of the ill-fated vessel were mustered on the deck of
the _Rhode Island_, four officers and twelve men were found missing, all
of them probably buried in an iron coffin in a watery grave about fifty
miles to the southward and eastward of Cape Hatteras Light.

* * * * *

The missing boat and crew of the _Rhode Island_ were found by that
vessel a week later safe in Beaufort, North Carolina. They had been
picked up by a schooner and taken into that port. The officer in charge
of the boat reported that in the early morning he had sighted a schooner
standing toward them, and had hoisted a black silk handkerchief
belonging to one of the crew on an oar as a signal of distress, but the
people in the schooner, evidently thinking them pirates who had come out
of some one of the inlets of the coast, turned tail and scudded away
from them. A second schooner, coming along soon after, was more
hospitable and took them aboard.

THE END

End of the