uld easily discover a dark cloud of
smoke hanging low in mid air, as though it sought to hide from the light
of heaven the deeds that were being done beneath it. Suddenly we
debouched into a level cornfield, extending quite to the river's verge.
The clearing was not a wide one, and the farther bank of the Tennessee
was in plain sight--the landings, the bluff, and the woods above
stretching away out and back beyond.

What a panorama! The river directly before us was hidden by a narrow
belt of chaparral and the drift that had lodged along the banks, but the
smoke stacks of three or four transports were visible above the weed
stalks and bushes, and the course of one or two more could be traced by
a distant, trailing line of smoke as they steamed down toward Savannah.
The opposite bank rises from the river a steep acclivity, perhaps a
hundred and fifty feet in perpendicular height, down whose sides of
brownish yellow clay narrow roadways showed out to the landings below.
Cresting the bluff, woods overlooked the whole, and shut in the scene
far as the eye could follow the windings of the Tennessee. In their
depths, the battle was raging with unabated fury. A short distance up
the river, though completely hidden from view by an intervening bend,
the gunboats were at work, and even our unpractised ears could easily
distinguish the heavy boom of their great thirty-two pounders in the
midst of all that blaze of battle and the storm of artillery explosions.
Glorious old Tyler and Lexington! primitive, ungainly, weather-beaten,
wooden craft, but the salvation, in this crisis hour of the fight, of
our out-numbered and wellnigh borne-down left. A signal party, stationed
a little above the upper landing and halfway up the bluff, was
communicating in the mystic language of the code with another upon our
side the river. What messages were those little party-colored flags
exchanging, with their curious devices of stripes and squares and
triangles, their combinations and figures in numberless variety, as they
were waved up and down and to and fro in rapid, ever-shifting pantomime?
The steep bank was covered with a swaying, restless mass of
blue-uniformed men, too distant to be distinctly discriminated, yet
certainly numbering thousands. 'Reserves!' a dozen voices cried at once,
and the next moment came the wonder that our march had been so hurried,
when whole brigades, as it seemed, could thus be held in idle waiting.
We were soon undece