serious and practical person most of the time. You've been away so long
that your standards are wrong. She's not nearly so knowing as she seems
to be."

The boat was preparing to land at Newport News--a sand bank, with a
railway terminus, a big elevator, and a hotel. The party streamed along
in laughing and chatting groups, through the warehouse and over the
tracks and the sandy hillocks to the hotel. On the way they captured a
novel conveyance, a cart with an ox harnessed in the shafts, the property
of an aged negro, whose white hair and variegated raiment proclaimed him
an ancient Virginian, a survival of the war. The company chartered this
establishment, and swarmed upon it till it looked like a Neapolitan
'calesso', and the procession might have been mistaken for a
harvest-home--the harvest of beauty and fashion. The hotel was captured
without a struggle on the part of the regular occupants, a dance
extemporized in the dining-room, and before the magnitude of the invasion
was realized by the garrison, the dancing feet and the laughing girls
were away again, and the little boat was leaping along in the Elizabeth
River towards the Portsmouth Navy-yard.

It isn't a model war establishment this Portsmouth yard, but it is a
pleasant resort, with its stately barracks and open square and occasional
trees. In nothing does the American woman better show her patriotism
than in her desire to inspect naval vessels and understand dry-docks
under the guidance of naval officers. Besides some old war hulks at the
station, there were a couple of training-ships getting ready for a
cruise, and it made one proud of his country to see the interest shown by
our party in everything on board of them, patiently listening to the
explanation of the breech-loading guns, diving down into the
between-decks, crowded with the schoolboys, where it is impossible for a