Perhaps the most singular and venturesome exploit ever performed in submarine diving was that of searching the sunken monitor Milwaukee during the bay-fight in Mobile harbor.  This sea-going fortress was a huge double-turreted monitor, with a ponderous, crushing projectile force in her.  Her battery of four fifteen-inch guns, and the tough, insensible solidity of her huge wrought-iron turrets and heavy plated hulk, burdened the sleepy waters of the bay.  Upon a time she braced her iron jacket about her, girded her huge sides with fifteen-inch pistolry, and went rolling her clumsy volume down the bay to mash Fort Taylor to rubbish and debacle.  The sea staggered under her ponderous gliding and groaned about her massive bulk as she wended her awkward course toward the bay-shore over against the fort.  She sighted her blunderbusses, and, rolling, grunting, wheezing in her revolving towers like a Falstaff ill at ease, spat her gobbets of flame and death.  The poor little water-spaniel fort ran down to the shore and barked at her of course. Cui bono or malo? Why, like Job’s mates, fill its poor belly with the east wind, or try to draw out leviathan with a hook, or his tongue with a cord thou lettest down?  Yet who treads of the fight between invulnerable Achilles and heroic Hector, and admires Achilles?  The admiral of the American fleet, sick of the premature pother, signaled the lazy solidity to return.  The loathly monster, slowly, like a bull-dog wrenched from his victim, rolled snarling, lazily, leisurely down the bay, not obeying and yet not disobeying the signal.

All along the sunny coast, like flowers springing up in a battle-field, were rows of little white cottages, tenanted by women and children—­love, life and peace in the midst of ruin and sudden death.  At the offending spectacle of homely peace among its enemies the unglutted monster eased its huge wrath.  Tumbling and bursting among the poor little pasteboard shells of cottages, where children played and women gossiped of the war, and prayed for its end, no matter how, fell the huge globes and cones of murder.  Shrieks and cries, slain babes and wounded women on shore; surly, half-mutinous officers and crew on that iron hulk, shocked at the fell work they were set to do; and the glimmer and wash of the bay-water below—­that sweet, tranquil, half-transparent liquid, with idle weeds and chips upon it, empty crates and boxes of dead merchandise, sacked of their life and substance by the war, as one might swallow an oyster; the soft veils of shadowy ships and the distant city spires; umbrageous fires and slips of shining sand all mirrored in the soft and quiet sea, while this devilish pother went on.  There is a buoy adrift!  No, it is a sodden cask, perhaps of spoiling meat, while the people in the town yonder are starving; and still the huge iron, gluttonous monster bursts its foam of blood and death, while the surly crew curse and think of mothers and babes at home.  Better to