The 11th day of December was now near its last
hour.
The steamer was the _Susquehanna_, a screw, of the United States Navy,
4,000 in tonnage, and carrying 20 guns. She had been detached to take
soundings between the Pacific coast and the Sandwich Islands, the
initiatory movement towards laying down an Ocean Cable, which the
_Pacific Cable Company_ contemplated finally extending to China. She lay
just now a few hundred miles directly south of San Diego, an old Spanish
town in southwestern California, and the point which is expected to be
the terminus of the great _Texas and Pacific Railroad_.
The Captain, John Bloomsbury by name, but better known as 'High-Low
Jack' from his great love of that game--the only one he was ever known
to play--was a near relation of our old friend Colonel Bloomsbury of the
Baltimore Gun Club. Of a good Kentucky family, and educated at
Annapolis, he had passed his meridian without ever being heard of, when
suddenly the news that he had run the gauntlet in a little gunboat past
the terrible batteries of Island Number Ten, amidst a perfect storm of
shell, grape and canister discharged at less than a hundred yards
distance, burst on the American nation on the sixth of April, 1862, and
inscribed his name at once in deep characters on the list of the giants
of the Great War.
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