[How many of you that read these notes can say the same thing!] With these follies mingled sweet delusions, which I loved so well I would not outgrow them, even when it required a voluntary effort to put a momentary trust in them.

Here is one which I cannot help telling you.
The firing of the great guns at the Navy-yard is easily heard at the place where I was born and lived.

"There is a ship of war come in," they used to say, when they heard them.

Of course, I supposed that such vessels came in unexpectedly, after indefinite years of absence,--suddenly as falling stones; and that the great guns roared in their astonishment and delight at the sight of the old war-ship splitting the bay with her cutwater.

Now, the sloop-of- war the Wasp, Captain Blakely, after gloriously capturing the Reindeer and the Avon, had disappeared from the face of the ocean, and was supposed to be lost.