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“At about five o’clock we crossed the harbour again, and stood to the westward. In passing we saw one spar of the Merrimac sticking out of the water. We hugged the shore just outside of the breakers for a mile, and then turned toward the Texas, when the batteries saw us and opened fire. It was then broad daylight. The first shot dropped thirty yards astern, but the others went wild.
Aiken were from the North of Ireland, particularly from Londonderry, Antrim and Belfast. At an early day one or two colonies came over to this country and settled on a tract of land on the Merrimac River, in New Hampshire, calling it Londonderry, after the name of the city from which most of them had emigrated.
The company at first made a pretense of trying to understand its geography, and asked a hundred questions about the batteries, and whence the Merrimac appeared, and where the Congress was sunk, and from what place the Monitor darted out upon its big antagonist. Song began to take the place of conversation.
The Monitor's attack upon the Merrimac would have been ineffective but for the remarkable guns with which the little craft was armed two eleven-inch rifled cannon, the invention of John Adolph Dahlgren. Dahlgren had been connected with the ordnance department of the navy at Washington for many years, and his inventions had revolutionized United States gunnery.
The township of Haverhill, even as late as the close of the seventeenth century, was a frontier settlement, occupying an advanced position in the great wilderness, which, unbroken by the clearing of a white man, extended from the Merrimac River to the French villages on the St. Francois.
When finished she was an ugly looking, black monster with sloping sides and a terrible iron beak, and she was given the name of the Merrimac. At this time there were only about three ironclads in all the world. They belonged to Britain and to France, and had never yet been used in naval warfare.
In the face of a terrific fire of shot and shell from Spanish guns the Merrimac ran into the narrow channel, where it was swung across and anchored. Then Lieutenant Hobson blew a hole in the ship's bottom and with his seven men took to a boat.
Eyes continued to peer into the darkness and ears to listen intently, while a tense anxiety strained the nerves of the watching crew. Then came a booming roar from Morro Castle and the flash of a cannon lit up for an instant the gloom. Other flashes and booming sounds followed, and for twenty minutes there seemed a battle going on in the darkness. The "Merrimac" was under fire.
I know enough to know that, she went on. 'Dear young lady, there are no bad parts, I answered, reassuringly. 'Why, Mr. Nettlepoint says it's horrid. 'It's horrid? 'Up there in the Batignolles. It's worse than Merrimac Avenue. 'Worse in what way? 'Why, even less where the nice people live. 'He oughtn't to say that, I returned. 'Don't you call Mr.
And the East differs from the West, the North from the South; and the Pacific States will have also to contribute gifts peculiar to themselves, as the silt of the Sacramento glitters unlike that of the Merrimac or the Potomac. We are not yet a People; but we have great, vivid masses of popular life, which a century of literary expression will not exhaust.
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