Coming out from the office of the Steamship Company, apparently wooed by the breeze from the North River, the lawyer bent his steps in that direction as if intending to make the tour of the shipping at the piers and resume his conveyance at some point higher up the town. Past two or three of the piers; and the dense black smoke pouring out from the funnels of one of the transport steamers on the eve of departure for the South with troops and munitions, seemed to attract his attention. He walked down the dock and observed more closely the movements on and around the vessel. The black smoke still rolled out, and steam was hissing from the escape-valves. Heavy wagons were discharging boxes at the gangway, and with much puffing and clatter a donkey-engine was hoisting them on board. A marine stood at the plank, bayonetted musket on shoulder, and close behind him an officer. To the civil inquiry of the lawyer, how long before the steamer would sail, the sentry replied that she was then steaming-up and would probably leave within a few hours; and to a request to be allowed to come on board and see the arrangements of a government transport on the eve of sailing, the officer, after a moment's glance at the unimpeachable dress and appearance of the visitor, assented with the stately bow of his profession. It certainly seemed strange that on that blazing day, when his errand at the Hudson side of the city had been to inhale the cool breeze from the river, Carlton Brand, within a moment after stepping on board the transport, should have ignored all the details of decks, spars, cabins, and even machinery, and descended the narrow stair-ways, little more than ladders, leading down to those flaming intestines of the ship from which the hot air crept up through the companion-ways like breaths from some roasting and agonized monster. Yet so it was; and regardless alike of the heat which fevered his lips and the greasy rails upon which he soiled his gloves and risked the smirching of his spotless summer garments, the lawyer pressed down to the fire-room, where the stokers were sweating great drops of perspiration that rolled down like beads from their broiled foreheads--where the coal was rattling and crashing as it was thrown forward, then crackling and hissing at its first contact with the flame, as it was dashed into the midst of the sweltering furnaces. Down, until he stood before those mighty furnaces and caught blinding glimpses, as the firemen momentarily opened the doors to dash in still other tons of the crackling coal of what seemed little less than a ship's-cargo of the fuel, seething, raging and lowing in such a heat that it made the old fancy of the lower pit no longer a dream but a horrible present reality.