Why Secession did not take this great place when its defenders numbered a squad of officers and three hundred men is mysterious.  Floyd and his gang were treacherous enough.  What was it?  Were they imbecile?  Were they timid?  Was there, till too late, a doubt whether the traitors at home in Virginia would sustain them in an overt act of such big overture as an attempt here?  But they lost the chance, and with it lost the key of Virginia, which General Butler now holds, this 30th day of May, and will presently begin to turn in the lock.

Three hundred men to guard a mile and a half of ramparts!  Three hundred to protect some sixty-five broad acres within the walls!  But the place was a Thermopylae, and there was a fine old Leonidas at the head of its three hundred.  He was enough to make Spartans of them.  Colonel Dimmick was the man,—­a quiet, modest, shrewd, faithful, Christian gentleman; and he held all Virginia at bay.  The traitors knew, that, so long as the Colonel was here, these black muzzles with their white tompions, like a black eye with a white pupil, meant mischief.  To him and his guns, flanking the approaches and ready to pile the moat full of Seceders, the country owes the safety of Fortress Monroe.

Within the walls are sundry nice old brick houses for officers’ barracks.  The jolly bachelors live in the casemates and the men in long barracks, now not so new or so convenient as they might be.  In fact, the physiognomy of Fortress Monroe is not so neat, well-shorn, and elegant as a grand military post should be.  Perhaps our Floyds, and the like, thought, if they kept everything in perfect order here, they, as Virginians, accustomed to general seediness, would not find themselves at home.  But the new regime must change all this, and make this the biggest, the best equipped, and the model garrison of the country.  For, of course, this must be strongly held for many, many years to come.  It is idle to suppose that the dull louts we find here, not enlightened even enough to know that loyalty is the best policy, can be allowed the highest privilege of the moral, the intelligent, and the progressive,—­self-government.  Mind is said to march fast in our time; but mind must put on steam hereabouts to think and act for itself, without stern schooling, in half a century.

But no digressing!  I have looked far away from the physiognomy of the fortress.  Let us turn to the

PHYSIOGNOMY OF THE COUNTRY.

The face of this county, Elizabeth City by name, is as flat as a Chinaman’s.  I can hardly wonder that the people here have retrograded, or rather, not advanced.  This dull flat would make anybody dull and flat.  I am no longer surprised at John Tyler.  He has had a bare blank brick house, entitled sweetly Margarita Cottage, or some such tender epithet, at Hampton, a mile and a half from the fort.  A summer in this site would make any man a bore.  And as something has done this favor for His Accidency, I am willing to attribute it to the influence of locality.