then left undisturbed by both sides,--and
fired our first shell into the camp at Wiltown Bluff at four o'clock in
the morning.

The battery--whether fixed or movable we knew not--met us with a
promptness that proved very short-lived. After three shots it was
silent, but we could not tell why. The bluff was wooded and we could see
but little. The only course was to land, under cover of the guns. As the
firing ceased and the smoke cleared away, I looked across the
rice-fields which lay beneath the bluff. The first sunbeams glowed upon
their emerald levels, and on the blossoming hedges along the rectangular
dikes. What were those black dots which everywhere appeared? Those moist
meadows had become alive with human heads, and along each narrow path
came a straggling file of men and women, all on a run for the
river-side. I went ashore with a boat-load of troops at once. The
landing was difficult and marshy. The astonished negroes tugged us up
the bank, and gazed on us as if we had been Cortez and Columbus. They
kept arriving by land much faster than we could come by water; every
moment increased the crowd, the jostling, the mutual clinging, on that
miry foothold. What a scene it was! With the wild faces, eager figures,
strange garments, it seemed, as one of the poor things reverently
suggested, "like notin' but de judgment day." Presently they began to
come from the houses also, with their little bundles on their heads;
then with larger bundles. Old women, trotting on the narrow paths, would
kneel to pray a little prayer, still balancing the bundle; and then
would suddenly spring up, urged by the accumulating procession behind,
and would move on till irresistibly compelled by thankfulness to dip
down for another invocation. Reaching us, every human being must grasp
our hands, amid exclamations of "Bress you, mas'r," and "Bress de Lord,"
at the rate of four of the latter ascriptions to one of the former.
Women brought children on their shoulders; small black boys carried on
their backs little brothers equally inky, and, gravely depositing them,
shook hands. Never had I seen human beings so clad, or rather so unclad,
in such amazing squalidness and destitution of garments. I recall one
small urchin without a rag of clothing save the basque waist of a lady's
dress, bristling with whalebones, and worn wrong side before, beneath
which his smooth ebony legs emerged like those of an ostrich from its
plumage. How weak is imaginati