“Fill her with men, and put two or three eighteen-pounders in her,” said the advocates of the measure.

“Where will you put your eighteen-pounders?” demanded the opposition.

“On the promenade-deck, to be sure.”

“Yes, and the moment you fire one, you’ll see it go through the bottom of the ship, and then you’ll have to go after it.”

During the two days previous to my second and successful attempt to quit Charleston, the city was in full expectation that the fort would shortly be attacked.  News had arrived that Federal troops were on their way with reinforcements.  An armed steamer had been seen off the harbor, both by night and day, making signals to Anderson.  The Governor went down to Sullivan’s Island to inspect the troops and Fort Moultrie.  The volunteers, aided by negroes and even negro women, worked all night on the batteries.  Notwithstanding we were close upon race-week, when the city is usually crowded, the streets had a deserted air, and nearly every acquaintance I met told me he had been down to the islands to see the preparations.  Yet the whole excitement, like others which had preceded, ended even short of smoke.  News came that reinforcements had not been sent to Anderson; and the destruction of that most inconvenient person was once more postponed.  People fell back on the old hope that the Government would be brought to listen to reason,—­that it would give up to South Carolina what it could not keep from her with justice, —­that it would grant, in short, the incontrovertible right of peaceable secession.  For, in the midst of all these labors and terrors, this expense and annoyance, no one talked of returning into the Union, and all agreed in deprecating compromise.

Once more, this time in the James Adger, I set sail from Charleston.  The boat lost one tide, and consequently one day, because at the last moment the captain found himself obliged to take out a South Carolina clearance.  As I passed down the harbor, I counted fourteen square-rigged vessels at the wharves, and one lying at anchor, while three others had just passed the bar, outward-bound, and two were approaching from the open sea.  Deterred from the Ship Channel by the sunken schooners, and from Maffitt’s Channel by the fate of the Columbia, we tried the Middle Channel, and glided over the bar without accident.

“Sailing to Charleston is very much like going foreign,” I said to a middle-aged sea-captain whom we numbered among our passengers.  “What with heaving the lead, and doing without beacons, and lying off the coast o’ nights, it makes one think of trading to new countries.”

I had, it seems, unintentionally pulled the string which jerked him.  Springing up, he paced about excitedly for a few moments, and then broke out with his story.

“Yes,—­I know it,—­I know as much about it as anybody, I reckon.  I lay off there nine days in a nor’easter and lost my anchors; and here I am going on to New York to buy some more; and all for those cursed Black Republicans!”