None were in uniform, but this proved nothing as to their being soldiers.

One of them, a mere boy, was captured at his own door, with gun in hand.

It was a fowling-piece, which he used only, as his mother plaintively assured me, "to shoot little birds with." As the guileless youth had for this purpose loaded the gun with eighteen buck-shot, we thought it justifiable to confiscate both the weapon and the owner, in mercy to the birds.
We took from this place, for the use of the army, a flock of some thirty sheep, forty bushels of rice, some other provisions, tools, oars, and a little lumber, leaving all possible space for the bricks which we expected to obtain just below.

I should have gone farther up the river, but for a dangerous boom which kept back a great number of logs in a large brook that here fell into the St.Mary's; the stream ran with force, and if the Rebels had wit enough to do it, they might in ten minutes so choke the river with drift-wood as infinitely to enhance our troubles.

So we dropped down stream a mile or two, found the very brickyard from which Fort Clinch had been constructed,--still stored with bricks, and seemingly unprotected.