We may take it for granted that Captain Colburne devoted much of his time during this voyage to meditations on Miss Ravenel. But lovers' reveries not being popular reading in these days, I shall omit all the interesting matter thus offered, notwithstanding that the young man has my earnest sympathies and good wishes.
One summer-like March morning the steam transport, black with men, lay bowing to the snow-like sand-drifts of Ship Island; and by sunset the regiment was ashore, the camp marked out, tents pitched, rations cooking, and line formed for dress-parade; an instance of military promptness which elicited the praises of Generals Phelps and Butler.
It is well known that the expedition against New Orleans started from Ship Island as its base. Over the organization of the enterprise, the battalion and brigade drills on the dazzling sands, the gun-boat fights in the offing with rebel cruisers from Mobile, the arrival of Farragut's frigates and Porter's bomb-schooners, and the grand review of the expeditionary force, I must hurry without a word of description, although I might make up a volume on these subjects from the newspapers of the day, and from three or four long and enthusiastic letters which Colburne wrote to Ravenel. But these matters do not properly come within the scope of this narrative, which is biographical and not historical. Parenthetically it may be well to remark that neither Carter nor Colburne ever referred to Miss Ravenel in their few and brief interviews. The latter was not disposed to talk of her to that listener; and the former was too much occupied with his duties to give much thought to an absent Dulcinea. The Colonel was no longer in that youthfully tender stage when absence increases affection. To make him love it was necessary to have a woman in pretty close personal propinquity.
In a month or two from the arrival of the Tenth Barataria at Ship Island it was again on board a transport, this time bound for New Orleans _via_ Fort Jackson.
"This part of Louisiana looks as the world must have looked in the marsupial period," says Colburne in a letter to the Doctor written from the Head of the Passes. "There are two narrow but seemingly endless antennæ of land; between them rolls a river and outside of them spreads an ocean. Dry land there is none, for the Mississippi being unusually high the soil is submerged, and the trees and shrubs of these long ribbons of underwood which enclose us have their boles in the water. I do not understand why the ichthyosauri should have died out in Louisiana. It certainly is not fitted, so far as I can see, for human habitation. May it not have been the chaos (_vide_ Milton) through which Satan floundered? Miss Ravenel will, I trust, forgive me for this hypothesis when she learns that it is suggested by your theory that Lucifer was and is and ever will be peculiarly at home in this part of the world."