The country is flat; the soil is fine sifted loam running to dust, as the air of England runs to fog; the woods are dense and beautiful and full of trees unknown to the parallel of New York; the roads are miserable cart-paths; the cattle are scalawags; so are the horses, not run away; so are the people, black and white, not run away; the crops are tolerable, where the invaders have not trampled them.

Altogether the whole concern strikes me as a failure.  Captain John Smith & Co. might as well have stayed at home, if this is the result of the two hundred and thirty years’ occupation.  Apparently the colonists picked out a poor spot; and the longer they stayed, the worse fist they made of it.  Powhattan, Pocahontas, and the others without pantaloons and petticoats, were really more serviceable colonists.

The farm-houses are mostly miserably mean habitations.  I don’t wonder the tenants were glad to make our arrival the excuse for running off.  Here are men claiming to have been worth forty thousand dollars, half in biped property, half in all other kinds, and they lived in dens such as a drayman would have disdained and a hod-carrier only accepted on compulsion.

PHYSIOGNOMY OF WATER.

Always beautiful! the sea cannot be spoilt.  Our fleet enlivens it greatly.  Here is the flag-ship “Cumberland” vis-a-vis the fort.  Off to the left are the prizes, unlucky schooners, which ought to be carrying pine wood to the kitchens of New York, and new potatoes and green peas for the wood to operate upon.  This region, by the way, is New York’s watermelon patch for early melons; and if we do not conquer a peace here pretty soon, the Jersey fruit will have the market to itself.

Besides stately flag-ships and poor little bumboat schooners, transports are coming and going with regiments or provisions for the same.  Here, too, are old acquaintances from the bay of New York,—­the “Yankee,” a lively tug,—­the “Harriet Lane,” coquettish and plucky,—­the “Catiline,” ready to reverse her name and put down conspiracy.

On the dock are munitions of war in heaps.  Volunteer armies load themselves with things they do not need, and forget the essentials.  The unlucky army-quartermaster’s people, accustomed to the slow and systematic methods of the by-gone days at Fortress Monroe, fume terribly over these cargoes.  The new men and the new manners of the new army do not altogether suit the actual men and manners of the obsolete army.  The old men and the new must recombine.  What we want now is the vigor of fresh people to utilize the experience of the experts.  The Silver-Gray Army needs a frisky element interfused.  On the other hand, the new army needs to be taught a lesson in method by the old; and the two combined will make the grand army of civilization.

THE FORCES.

When I arrived, Fort Monroe and the neighborhood were occupied by two armies.