who is always
"On the Blockade" against Melancholy, "The Blues,"
and all similar maladies,

This Volume
is affectionately dedicated.




PREFACE


"ON THE BLOCKADE" is the third of "The Blue and the Gray Series." Like
the first and second volumes, its incidents are dated back to the War
of the Rebellion, and located in the midst of its most stirring scenes
on the Southern coast, where the naval operations of the United States
contributed their full share to the final result.

The writer begs to remind his readers again that he has not felt called
upon to invest his story with the dignity of history, or in all cases
to mingle fiction with actual historic occurrences. He believes that all
the scenes of the story are not only possible, but probable, and that
just such events as he has narrated really and frequently occurred in
the days of the Rebellion.

The historian is forbidden to make his work more palatable or more
interesting by the intermixture of fiction with fact, while the
story-writer, though required to be reasonably consistent with the