may take it for granted that Captain Colburne devoted much of his time during this voyage to meditations on Miss Ravenel. But lovers' reveries not being popular reading in these days, I shall omit all the interesting matter thus offered, notwithstanding that the young man has my earnest sympathies and good wishes.
One summer-like March morning the steam transport, black with men, lay bowing to the snow-like sand-drifts of Ship Island; and by sunset the regiment was ashore, the camp marked out, tents pitched, rations cooking, and line formed for dress-parade; an instance of military promptness which elicited the praises of Generals Phelps and Butler.
It is well known that the expedition against New Orleans started from Ship Island as its base. Over the organization of the enterprise, the battalion and brigade drills on the dazzling sands, the gun-boat fights in the offing with rebel cruisers from Mobile, the arrival of Farragut's frigates and Porter's bomb-schooners, and the grand review of the expeditionary force, I must hurry without a word of description, although I might make up a volume on these subjects from the newspapers of the day, and from three or four long and enthusiastic letters which Colburne wrote to Ravenel. But these matters do not properly come within the scope of this narrative, which is biographical and not historical. Parenthetically it may be well to remark that neither Carter nor Colburne ever referred to Miss Ravenel in their few and brief interviews. The latter was not disposed to talk of her to that listener; and the former was too much occupied with his duties to give much thought to an absent Dulcinea. The Colonel was no longer in that youthfully tender stage when absence increases affection. To make him love it was necessary to have a woman in pretty close personal propinquity.
In a month or two from the arrival of the Tenth Barataria at Ship Island it was again on board a transport, this time bound for New Orleans via Fort Jackson.
"This part of Louisiana looks as the world must have looked in the marsupial period," says Colburne in a letter to the Doctor written from the Head of the Passes. "There are two narrow but seemingly endless antennæ of land; between them rolls a river and outside of them spreads an ocean. Dry land there is none, for the Mississippi being unusually high the soil is submerged, and the trees and shrubs of these long ribbons of underwood which enclose us have their boles in the water. I do not understand why the ichthyosauri should have died out in Louisiana. It certainly is not fitted, so far as I can see, for human habitation. May it not have been the chaos (vide Milton) through which Satan floundered? Miss Ravenel will, I trust, forgive me for this hypothesis when she learns that it is suggested by your theory that Lucifer was and is and ever will be peculiarly at home in this part of the world."
In a subsequent passage he gives a long account of the famous bombardment of the forts, which I feel obliged to suppress as not strictly biographical, he not being under fire but only an eye-witness and ear-witness of the cannonade. One paragraph alone I deem it worth while to copy, being a curious analysis of the feelings of the individual in the presence of sublime but monotonous circumstance.
"Here we are, in view of what I am told is the greatest bombardment known in marine, or, as I should call it, amphibious warfare. You take it for granted, I suppose, that we are in a state of constant and noble excitement; but the extraordinary truth is that we are in a condition of wearisome ennui and deplorable désœuvrement. We are too ignorant of the great scientific problems of war to take an intelligent interest in the fearful equation of fleets=forts. We got tired a week ago of the mere auricular pleasure of the incessant bombing. We got tired a day or two afterward of climbing to the crosstrees to look at the fading globes of smoke left aloft in the air by the bursting shells. We are totally tired of the monotonous flow of the muddy river, and the interminable parallel curves of its natural levees and the glassy stretches of ocean which seem to slope upwards toward the eastern and western horizon. We pass our time in playing cards, smoking, grumbling at our wretched fare, exchanging dull gossip and wishing that we might be allowed to do something. Happy is the man who chances once a day to find a clear space of a dozen feet on the crowded deck where he can take a constitutional. Waiting for a belated train, alone, in a country railroad station, is not half so wearisome."
But in a subsequent page of the same letter he makes record of startling events and vivid emotions.
"The fleet has forced the passage of the forts. We have had a day and a night of almost crazy excitement. A battle, a victory, a glorious feat of arms has been achieved within our hearing, though beyond our sight and range of action. A submerged iron-clad, one of the wrecks of the enemy's fleet, drifted against our cable, shook us over the edge of eternity, and then floated by harmlessly. Blazing fire-ships have passed us, lighting up the midnight river until its ripples seemed of flame."
In another part of the letter he says, "The forts have surrendered, and we are steaming up the Mississippi in the track of that amazing Farragut. As I look around me with what knowledge of science there is in my eyes, I feel as if I had lived a few millions of years since yesterday; for within twenty-four hours we have sailed out of the marsupial period into the comparatively modern era of fluvial deposits and luxuriant vegetation. Give my compliments to Miss Ravenel, and tell her that I modify my criticisms on the scenery of Louisiana. On either side the land is a living emerald. The plantation houses are embowered in orange groves—in a glossy mass of brilliant, fragrant verdure. I do not know the names of a quarter of the plants and trees which I see; but I pass the livelong day in admiring and almost adoring their tropical beauty. We are no welcome tourists, at least not to the white inhabitants; very few of them show themselves, and they do not answer our cheering, nor hardly look at us; they walk or ride grimly by, with faces set straight forward, as if they could thereby ignore our existence. But to the negroes we evidently appear as friends and redeemers. Such joyous gatherings of dark faces, such deep-chested shouts of welcome and deliverance, such a waving of green boughs and white vestments, and even of pickaninnies—such a bending of knees and visible praising of God for his long-expected and at last realized mercy, salutes our eyes from morn till night, as makes me grateful to Heaven for this hour of holy triumph. How glorious will be that time, now near at hand, when our re-united country will be free of the shame and curse of slavery!"
Miss Ravenel spit in her angry pussy-cat fashion when her father read to her this passage of the letter.
"We are in New Orleans," proceeds Colburne towards the close of this prodigious epistle. "Our regiment was the first to reach the city and to witness the bareness of the once-crowded wharves, the desertion of the streets and the sullen spite of the few remaining inhabitants. I suspect that your aristocratic acquaintances have all fled at the approach of the Vandal Yankees, for I see only negroes, poor foreigners, and rowdies more savage-looking than the tribes of the Bowery. The spirit of impotent but impertinent hate in this population is astonishing. The ragged news-boys will not sell us a paper—the beggarly restaurants will not furnish us a dinner. Wherever I walk I am saluted by mutterings of 'Damned Yankee!'—'Cut his heart out!' &c. &c. I once more profess allegiance to your theory that this is where Satan's seat is. But the evil spirits who inhabit this city of desolation only grimace and mumble, without attempting any manner of injury. If Miss Ravenel fears that there will be a popular insurrection and a consequent burning of the city, assure her from me that she may dismiss all such terrors."
And here, from mere lack of space rather than of interesting matter, I must close my extracts from this incomparably elongated letter. I question, by the way, whether Colburne would have covered so much paper had he not been reasonably justified in imagining a pretty family picture of the Doctor reading and Miss Ravenel listening.
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