The commander made up a detail from our company to keep watch at Eastport for the next appearance of the gunboats. On the river bank was an old elevator topped with a tower by which grain and produce could be loaded and unloaded into steamboats. We used this old building as a watch tower at night, and during the day we were stationed on the high bluff, two of us watching together. One night my companion and I had been discussing the probability of being able to discern the approach of a gunboat, as they concealed all lights and muffled the exhaust of their engines. In the darkness and the silence our conversation turned to idle fancies. To the soldier actually engaged in war death seems ever near, and, with the mind so attuned, it is but a step from the natural to the supernatural. My companion had asked me if I believed in ghosts, or in the appearance on earth of the spirits of the dead. I told him that from the old slaves of my father I had imbibed the superstitious fear of ghosts, or, as they called them, “hants;” but that as I had grown older, my mind had been disabused of the hair-raising philosophy of headless men and white-sheeted women. “Then,” said he, “I will tell you a story of this place.” As a solemn and somewhat uncanny prelude to his story, he slowly repeated the couplet, “Into the sea, out of the sea, All that is mine comes back to me;” and continued: “In the year 1845 a steamboat captain named Moore was running on the Tennessee between Eastport, Miss., and Paducah, Ky. His wife had been lost in a river disaster; but he had a daughter, beautiful and accomplished, whose rearing had been the pressing care of his lonely life. After her school days, the young lady spent much of her time on her father’s boat and with friends here at Eastport. The pride of her father’s heart and with many admirers, she was ‘the observed of all observers’ at all the balls and other social functions so frequent on the boat which was the center of life for this lonely section. It soon developed, as is nearly always the case, that the young man who won her heart was not her father’s choice among her many suitors. “When the young lovers could not reconcile the father to their promised marriage, they stole away from the boat on a dark night when the river was at high stage, climbed to the top of this old tower, lashed themselves together, and jumped into the raging waters; and it is said that to this day, when the river runs high and the moon is gone and the clouds curtain the stars, the spirits of those long-gone lovers return to the base of this tower and struggle again with the engulfing waves, and wild sounds rise from the rushing waters as if a man had moaned and a woman shrieked.”