To keep one another in countenance as we held our uncertain positions on the rolling and plunging deck, we combined to rehearse all the old jokes about sea sickness. One gave a definition of it, which, like many another indifferent thing, has been unwarrantably fathered on the late President. “Sea sickness is a disorder which for the first hour makes you afraid you’ll die, but by the second hour makes you afraid you won’t!” Another recited Artemus Ward’s groaning lamentation over Point Judith, to the effect that he “never before saw a place where it was so hard to keep inside one’s clothes and outside one’s breakfast!” “Sure, it isn’t say sick yez are,” pleasantly suggested an Irish engineer, among the officers, who looked provokingly happy amid all the pitching—“it isn’t say sick yez are; but yez mighty sick of the say!” “O si sic omnes!” punned the Chief Justice. How the rest stood it I don’t know; but that was the last straw, and drove one unfortunate of the party to his state-room, and a basin and towel. Toward evening the sea calmed down, and one after another emerged on deck. The air was delightfully bracing; the moon sent its broad streams of light, shaking across the waters; the revolving light of Hatteras shone out—guide and safeguard to a hundred eyes besides our own—and so with calmest weather, and a delicious beauty of scene that no words need be vainly employed in efforts to describe, we spent half the night in watching the passage of the ship by the most dangerous part of the Atlantic coast. Next morning, at breakfast, we were steaming under the guns of Port Macon into the harbor where Butler and Porter rendezvoused for Fort Fisher. As a boat’s crew slowly pulled some of our party through the tortuous channel by which even the lightest gigs have to approach the single landing of Beaufort, the guns of the naval force began to thunder out a salute for the Chief Justice. “How many guns does a Chief Justice receive?” inquired one, as he counted the successive discharges. “You’d a great deal better ask,” reprovingly hinted the Doctor, “how many guns a Baptist minister receives!” “Well, how many, Doctor!” “Oh, just count these up, and then you’ll know!” With which church-militant suggestion, we rounded to at a crazy old wharf, climbed up a pair of rickety steps that gave the Doctor premonitions of more immersion than even he had bargained for, and stood in the town of Beaufort, North Carolina. In front of us was the Custom House—a square, one-story frame building, perched upon six or eight posts—occupied now by a Deputy Treasury Agent. A narrow strip of sand, plowed up by a few cart wheels, and flanked by shabby-looking old frame houses, extended along the water front, and constituted the main business street of a place that, however dilapidated and insignificant, must live in the history of the struggle just ended. Near the water’s edge was a small turpentine distillery, the only manufacturing establishment of the place.