290 AUTOBIOGRAPHY 



shelled the Island and held possession of it until 

 the end of the Civil War. 



When peace came, Mr. Avery contracted with a 

 New York firm to open and work the mine. I 

 had the pleasure of standing in that great under- 

 ground, dome-like room which was about twenty 

 feet high and more than forty feet in diameter, 

 where salt, pure-white and glistening was beneath, 

 above and on all sides. Large blocks and cubes 

 of salt were being blasted from the sides and ceil- 

 ing, so large that they had to be broken up before 

 they could be lifted to the surface. There they 

 were passed through a corn-mill and ground fine 

 or coarse as desired. A railway has now been built 

 from the main line to the salt-mine, a distance of 

 about ten miles. 



I am reminded by this of the other tales I have 

 heard of the difficulty of procuring salt during 

 war times. The father of one of my students 

 who lived at Laurens, South Carolina a man 

 who had dug up the lead pipe which served to 

 carry water from a hydraulic ram to his house and 

 sent it to the army to be melted up into bullets 

 when they could no longer get salt, leached the 

 earth in the smoke-house from which a small but 

 very impure supply was obtained. When even this 



