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176 loose and the order to fire given. The guns roared and the screeching shells sped away to burst over the heads of the astounded Moors, who stood not upon the order of their going, but disappeared, not however so mysteriously as they had appeared on the scene. The puzzle was solved: they seemed to run right into the side of the cliff. Evidently they were troglodytes and the caves were their homes. Whether or not our shells had hurt any of them we never knew.

Three weeks and more had passed and we were getting very wearied. Our mission was now no longer a secret. We were waiting for the Rappahannock for the purpose of giving her our battery, ammunition, and a part of our crew—she was supposed to bring her own officers.

The evening after our little fracas with the moody Moors, the hour at which the discipline of the ship was usually suspended and when the men, after their day's work, gathered on the forecastle and sang their sailor songs, while the officers, having dined, were seated around the waist guns enjoying their cigars and engaged in conversation or dreamily listening to the words of a favorite sailor ditty, the refrain of which was, "Eight bells began to go: I love to hear them ring, my dear, and so do you, I know"—at this hour, the most pleasant of the twenty-four, when even a lonesome midshipman could butt into the conversation without fear the lonely captain, it seemed, also of being—snubbed craved by the society of his fellow men, and he joined the group around the gun where we were speculating on the causes which might have delayed the Rappahannock. I was the only person on board who had ever seen her, and I expressed the opinion that she had never left port, and that anyhow I believed the little Georgia, bad as she was, was the better ship of the two—that the Rappahannock was a bluff-bowed old water-bruiser that did not have any speed under steam, and that my friends, the midshipmen, on board of her had told me she was "hogged" (strained) by lying on