whereby they can be brought to light. A storm of cannon-shot damages
them no more than a handful of dried peas. We saw the shot-marks made
by the great artillery of the Merrimack on the outer casing of the iron
tower; they were about the breadth and depth of shallow saucers, almost
imperceptible dents, with no corresponding bulge on the interior
surface. In fact, the thing looked altogether too safe; though it may
not prove quite an agreeable predicament to be thus boxed up in
impenetrable iron, with the possibility, one would imagine, of being
sent to the bottom of the sea, and, even there, not drowned, but
stifled. Nothing, however, can exceed the confidence of the officers in
this new craft. It was pleasant to see their benign exultation in her
powers of mischief, and the delight with which they exhibited the
circumvolutory movement of the tower, the quick thrusting forth of the
immense guns to deliver their ponderous missiles, and then the
immediate recoil, and the security behind the closed port-holes. Yet
even this will not long be the last and most terrible improvement in
the science of war. Already we hear of vessels the armament of which is
to act entirely beneath the surface of the water; so that, with no
other external symptoms than a great bubbling and foaming, and gush of
smoke, and belch of smothered thunder out of the yeasty waves, there
shall be a deadly fight going on below,--and, by-and-by, a sucking
whirlpool, as one of the ships goes down.

The Monitor was certainly an object of great interest; but on our way
to Newport News, whither we next went, we saw a spectacle that
affected us with far profounder emotion. It was the sight of the few
sticks that are left of the frigate Congress, stranded near the
shore,--and still more, the masts of the Cumberland rising midway out
of the water, with a tattered rag of a pennant fluttering from one of
them. The invisible hull of the latter ship seems to be careened over,