Blockading was desperately tedious work, make the best one could of it. The largest reservoir of anecdotes was sure to run dry; the deepest vein of original humor to be worked out. I remember hearing of two notorious tellers of stories being pitted against each other, for an evening's amusement, when one was driven as a last resource to recounting that "Mary had a little lamb." We were in about that case. Charleston, however, was a blooming garden of social refreshment compared with the wilderness of the Texas coast, to which I found myself exiled a year or so later; a veritable Siberia, cold only excepted. Charleston was not very far from the Chesapeake or Delaware, in distance or in time. Supply vessels, which came periodically, and at not very long intervals, arrived with papers not very late, and with fresh provisions not very long slaughtered; but by the time they reached Galveston or Sabine Pass, which was our station, their news was stale, and we got the bottom tier of fresh beef. The ship to which I there belonged was a small steam-corvette, which with two gunboats constituted all the social possibilities. Happily for myself, I did not join till midway in the corvette's stay off the port, which lasted in all nearly six months, before she was recalled in mercy to New Orleans. I have never seen a body of intelligent men reduced so nearly to imbecility as my shipmates then were. One of my captains used to adduce, as his conception of the extreme of isolation, to be the keeper of a lightship off Cape Horn; a professional conceit rivalling the elder Mr. Weller's equally profound recognition of the connection between keeping a pike and misanthropy. We off Sabine Pass were banished about equally with the keeper of a turnpike or of a remote lightship. We ought, of course, to have improved the leisure which weighed so heavily on our hands; but the improvement of idle moments is an accomplishment of itself, as many a retired business man has found out too late. There is an impression, derived from the experience of passengers on board ocean steamers, that naval officers have an abundance of spare time. The ship, it seems assumed, runs itself; the officers have only to look on and enjoy. As a matter of fact, sea officers under normal conditions are as busy as the busiest house-keeper, with the care to boot of two, three, four, or five hundred children, to be kept continually doing as they should; the old woman who lived in the shoe had a good thing in comparison. Thus occupied, the leisure habit of self-improvement, other than in the practice of the calling, is not formed. At sea, on a voyage, the vicissitudes of successive days provide the desultory succession of incidents, which vary and fill out the tenor of occupations, keeping life full and interesting. In port, besides the regular and fairly engrossing routine, there are the resources of the shore to fill up the chinks. But the dead monotony of the blockade was neither sea nor port.