Page:The Granite Monthly Volume 5.djvu/279

Rh But alas for bodily cowardice as contrasted with moral and mental courage! Patient endurance was hard to practice. Returning to secular subjects, the natural train of thought and conversation was concerning preventives and antidotes,—helps to resist our fell foe. "Should we dine or should we not?" The hot sun, the freshening winds, the roll of the billows, and the increased motion were beginning to make their effects felt.

"If we had had luncheon when we first came on board we could have stood it!" "It was being so hungry and so empty, and the sight of the food!"

"We oughtn't to have gone below so soon; if we had waited and had some brandy and water and a little hard biscuit we should have been better."

"No, we ought to have lain down at once. It was staying up and looking at things, and having to talk and pretend to enjoy ourselves, just at the worst time, just at the time when we bore away into the open sea, that made us realize how wretched we felt. If we had not made an effort!"

An afternoon of misery and a night of lesser horror followed. Whoever could win sleep, found oblivion; but many there were who could not. Truly it was a time to discover of what stuff soldiers are made, and it was the universal sentiment and belief that the celebrants of the Yorktown Centennial should be conceded a niche in the temple of American veneration, in the neighborhood of those who made such celebration incumbent.

The next morning we were in southern waters, on a placid sea with a tropic sun beating down upon us. "Why," said one to loyal resentment inclined, "why need Thomas Buchanan Read, an American, have sung,

The mot is too delicious not to be recorded.

Why, indeed?

But we are nearing interesting localities. All lassitude and thoughts of sea-sickness are banished as entirely as though they never had been. In the glowing sunshine we entered the beautiful Chesapeake Bay, memorable with scenes in the nation's two great struggles,—first for its being and again for its existence. All on the Frances remember the first sight of Virginia soil. We pass Fortress Munroe while we are a dinner, and all leave the table to gaze upon the formidable pile whose importance to the government during our civil war has become historical, and smile patronizing, pitying smiles at the remembrance that poor deluded Jefferson Davis was once a gloomy prisoner there. The passage up the York river becomes exciting. All are out on deck. Those who served in the Rebellion point out places grown familiar to them in terrible circumstances.

It was four o'clock in the afternoon when we arrived at Yorktown. Gen. Geo. E. Lane, who as Commissary-General had preceded his brother officers of the Governor's staff by a week, now came out to meet them and was joyfully hailed.

What a sight it was when we came up to the wharf! Vessels of every description, size and nationality, crowded the port, their towering masts, and infinitude of ropes and lines, seeming like a mighty, leafless winter forest, its lofty denuded monarchs reaching their bare heads heavenward and stretching abroad their bare quivering arms.

But on shore! The motley crowd looked like a people of masqueraders gone mad, like a Mardi Gras carnival, like a parade of antiques and horribles on a New England Fourth of July morning. But it was only a slight mingling of centennial visitors with the negro hack-drivers and porters and coachmen