But in the meanwhile the monitors had been hammering away at her with their heavy shot. Her rudder and smoke-stack were shot away, and her shutters jammed, and as the “Hartford” bore down upon her for the third time she showed her white flag and surrendered.
The “Hartford” was greatly cut up,—twenty-five killed and twenty-eight wounded,—but the admiral had not a scratch to show for his deadly encounters. He came on deck just as the poor fellows who had been killed were being carefully laid out on the port side of the quarter-deck.
“It was a great victory, Drayton,” said he, sadly, “but——”
And the men saw him turn aside, tears coursing down his cheeks.
In truth, “there is nothing half so melancholy as a battle lost, except a battle won.”
AT THE NAVAL ACADEMY
In times like those we have but recently passed through, when the theories and studies of thirty years are being put to tests of fire and the sword, it is interesting to turn for a moment to our naval school at Annapolis, where the officers who planned our campaigns, directed our battles and our blockades, and commanded our ships were first trained to the serious business of war. Though the years which have passed since 1861 have made changes in the personnel system and appearance of the Naval Academy, the city of Annapolis itself is the same sleepy, careless, happy-go-lucky town of earlier days.
Once a year, and only once, it rouses itself from its lethargy and assumes an air of gayety and importance which it may not even have shown when it earned for itself the title of “The Gayest Colonial Capital.” During the latter part of May and the first of June each train that pulls into the ramshackle station bears a load of pretty young women,—sisters, cousins, sweethearts,—who come for the two-weeks’ exercises, when the naval cadets are graduated, and for the June ball. It has been so since the founding of the Naval Academy, and will be so as long as youngsters in brass buttons are brought up to be professional heroes.
In the old colonial days Annapolis was rich. There was an English governor, and grouped about him were some of the oldest English families. In the middle of the eighteenth century Annapolis had become refined, gay, elegant, and even dissipated.