“Well, by-and-by Mr. Morris, our first lieutenant, who all the while had been walking up and down the quarter-deck, his trumpet under his arm, and his eyes glistening like a school-boy’s just let out to play; by-and-by _he_ begins to look sour, ’ticularly when he sees his favourite coxswain of the first cutter carried by a shot through the opposite port. So he first looks hard at the Old Man, and then walks up to him, and says by way of a hint, in a low tone, ‘The ship is ready for action, sir, and the men are getting impatient;’—the Old Man never turns, but keeps his eye steadily on the enemy, while he replies, ‘Are—you—all ready, Mr. Morris?’—‘All ready, sir,’—says the lieutenant—‘Don’t fire a gun till I give the orders, Mr. Morris,’—says the old man. Presently up comes a midshipman from the main-deck, touches his hat—‘First division all ready, sir,—the second lieutenant reports the enemy’s shot have hurt his men, and he can with difficulty restrain them from returning their fire;’—‘Tell him to wait for orders, Mr. Morris,’ says the old man again—never turning his head. Well—just, you see, as the young gentleman turned to go below, and another shot carries off Mr. Bush, lieutenant of marines—just as we begins to run into their smoke, and even the old gun-boat men, as had been with Decatur and Somers, begins to stare, up jumps the old man in the air, slaps his hand on his thigh with a report like a pistol, and roars out in a voice that reached the gunners in the magazines—‘Now, Mr. Morris, give it to them,—now give it to them—fore and aft—round and grape—give it to ’em, sir—give it to ’em,’ and the words was scarce out of his mouth, before our whole broadside glanced at half pistol shot—the old ship trembling from her keel to her trucks, like an aspen, at the roar of her own batteries—instantly shooting ahead and doubling across his bows, we gave him the other with three cheers, and then at it we went—regular hammer and tongs. You would a thought you were in a thunder storm in the tropics, from the continual roar and flash of the batteries. In ten minutes, his mizen-mast went by the board. ‘Hurrah!’ shouts the old man; ‘hurrah, boys, we’ve made a brig of her.—Fire low, never mind their top hamper! hurrah! we’ll make a sloop of her before we’ve done.’ In ten minutes more over went her main-mast, carrying twenty men overboard as it went; and sure enough, sir, in thirty minutes, that ere Englishman was a sheer hulk, smooth as a canoe, not a spar standing but his bowsprit; and his decks so completely swept by our grape and cannister, that there was barely hands enough left to haul down the colours, as they had bravely nailed to the stump of their main-mast. ‘I say, Kennedy,’ says the vent-holder to me, lying across the gun after she struck, looking out at the wrack through the port, and his nose was as black as a nigger’s from the powder flashing under it—‘I say, I wonder how that ere Englishman likes the smell of the old man’s snuff.’”