invaded and desecrated our soil; and we shall continue to beat them to the end.  The just God of Heaven, who looks down upon the quarrels of men, will avenge the right.  May we prove ourselves in this struggle worthy of Him and of our great cause!  My poor distressed family!  How fondly my thoughts revert to them to-day!  My dear wife and daughters, instead of preparing the accustomed “cake” to celebrate my birthday, are mourning my absence, and dreading to hear of disaster.  May our Heavenly Father console, cherish, and protect them!

CHAPTER VI.

A dull time—­“Sail, oh-h-h!”—­An exciting chase—­No prize—­A gale—­Jack’s holiday—­A new cruising-ground—­Dead calm—­An enlightened Frenchman—­A near thing—­Patience!—­The Daniel Trowbridge—­A lucky haul—­In closer—­Double Duns—­The prize schooner’s revenge—­Good news from home—­An apology—­In hopes of a fight—­Disappointment—­The West India station—­Another blank—­Martinique.

Another dull time now set in.  On the 28th September the prize crew were recalled from the Joseph Park, which, after doing duty for some hours longer as a look-out ship, was finally at nightfall, set on fire, and burned to the water’s edge.  And now day after day passed by, unrelieved save by the little common incidents of a peaceful voyage.

One day it would be a flying-fish that had leaped on board, and paid the penalty of its indiscretion by doing duty next morning on the captain’s breakfast-table; another day a small sword-fish performed a similar exploit; while on a third a heavy rain provided the great unwashed of the forecastle with the unaccustomed luxury of copious ablutions in fresh water.  But not a sail was to be seen.  Once only a simultaneous cry from half-a-dozen sailors of “Light on the starboard bow!” produced a temporary excitement, and caused the engineers to “fire up” at their utmost speed.  But the alarm proved false.  The red light that had been so confidently reckoned on as the port lantern of some steamer moving across the Sumter’s bows, was at length set down as a mere meteor, or it might be some star setting crimson through the dim haze of the distant horizon.  Luck seemed quite to have deserted the Confederate flag.  They were lying in the very track of vessels between San Roque and New York.  Allowing a space of seventy-five miles on either side of the Sumter’s station as the extent of this track, and calculating upon a radius of observation from her masthead of fifteen miles, one-fifth of the whole number passing should certainly have come within her ken.  Yet in the course of seventeen weary days one vessel only had been seen, and the Sumter’s stock of patience was beginning to run very low.