"You will hear it, some day, tolling for an execution," I said.
"Do they hang rebels there?" she asked, looking up at me so wonderingly, so innocently that I stood silent instead of answering, surprised at such beauty in a young girl's eyes.
"Where is King's College?" she asked. I showed her the building bounded by Murray, Chapel, Barckley and Church streets, and then I pointed out the upper barracks behind the jail, and the little lake beyond divided by a neck of land on which stood the powder-house.
Far across the West Ward I could see the windows of Mr. Lispenard's mansion shining in the setting sun, and the road to Greenwich winding along the river.
She tired of my instruction after a while, and her eyes wandered to the bay. A few ships lay off Paulus Hook; the Jersey shore seemed very near, although full two miles distant, and the islands, too, seemed close in-shore where the white wings of gulls flashed distantly.
A jack flew from the Battery, another above the fort, standing out straight in the freshening breeze from the bay. Far away across the East River I saw the accursed Jersey swinging, her black, filthy bulwarks gilded by the sun; and below, her devil's brood of hulks at anchor, all with the wash hung out on deck a-drying in the wind.
"What are they?" she asked, surprising something else than the fixed smile of deference in my face.
"Prison ships, madam. Yonder the rebels die all night, all day, week after week, year after year. That black hulk you see yonder--the one to the east--stripped clean, with nothing save a derrick for bow-sprit and a signal-pole for mast, is the Jersey, called by another name, sometimes----"
"What name?"
"Some call her 'The Hell,'" I answered. And, after a pause: "It must be hot aboard, with every porthole nailed."
"What can rebels expect?" she asked calmly.
"Exactly! There are some thousand and more aboard the Jersey. When the wind sets from the south, on still mornings, I have heard a strange moaning--a low, steady, monotonous plaint, borne inland over the city. But, as you say, what can rebels expect, madam?"
"What is that moaning sound you say that one may hear?" she demanded.
"Oh, the rebels, dying from suffocation--clamoring for food, perhaps--perhaps for water! It is hard on the guards who have to go down every morning into that reeking, stifling hold and drag out the dead rebels festering there----"
"But that is horrible!" she broke out, blue eyes wide with astonishment--then, suddenly silent, she gazed at me full in the face. "It is incredible," she said quietly; "it is another rebel tale. Tell me, am I not right?"