It was now that I made the acquaintance—soon to ripen into a warm friendship—of Colonel William Lamb, the Commandant of Fort Fisher,—a man of whose courtesy, courage, and capacity all the English who knew him spoke in the highest terms. Originally a Virginian lawyer and afterwards the editor of a newspaper, he volunteered at the outbreak of the war, and rising rapidly to the grade of colonel was given the command of Fort Fisher, a post which he filled with high distinction till its fall in 1865. With the blockade-runners he was immensely popular; always on the alert and ever ready to reach a helping hand, he seemed to think no exertion too great to assist their operations, and many a smart vessel did his skill and activity snatch from the very jaws of the blockaders. He came to be regarded by the runners as their guardian angel; and it was no small support in the last trying moments of a run to remember who was in Fort Fisher. So much did we value his services and so grateful were we for them, that at my suggestion my firm subsequently presented him with a battery of six Whitworth guns, of which he was very proud; and good use he made of them in keeping the blockaders at a respectful distance. They were guns with a great range, which many a cruiser found to its cost when venturing too close in chase down the coast. Lamb would gallop them down behind the sandhills, by aid of mules, and open fire upon the enemy before he was aware of his danger. Neither must I forget his charming wife (alas, now numbered among the majority); her hospitality and kindness were unbounded, and many a pleasant social evening have I and my brother blockade-runners spent in her little cottage outside the fort. [Illustration: PORTRAIT OF COLONEL LAMB. _To face page 56._] The following extract from _Southern Historical Papers_, written by Colonel Lamb a few years ago, will doubtless interest my readers; also the account, copied from the _Wilmington Messenger_, of a meeting which took place lately between him and General Curtis at Fort Fisher. In the fall of 1857 a lovely Puritan maiden, still in her teens, was married in Grace Church, Providence, Rhode Island, to a Virginia youth, just passed his majority, who brought her to his home in Norfolk, a typical ancestral homestead, where beside the "white folks" there was quite a colony of family servants, from the pickaninny just able to crawl to the old gray-headed mammy who had nursed "ole massa." She soon became enamoured of her surroundings and charmed with the devotion of her coloured maid, whose sole duty it was to wait upon her young missis. When the John Brown raid burst upon the South and her husband was ordered to Harper's Ferry, there was not a more indignant matron in all Virginia, and when at last secession came, the South did not contain a more enthusiastic little rebel.