r a lonely stunted growth, or a bare trunk that still stood
tottering on the edge of a banks its pitiful withered roots reaching out
below. The May weather was already sickly hot.

First of all there was a murderous assault, and a still more murderous
repulse. Three times the besiegers charged, sank their color staffs
into the redoubts, and three times were driven back. Then the blue army
settled into the earth and folded into the ravines. Three days in that
narrow space between the lines lay the dead and wounded suffering untold
agonies in the moist heat. Then came a truce to bury the dead, to bring
back what was left of the living.

The doomed city had no rest. Like clockwork from the Mississippi's banks
beyond came the boom and shriek of the coehorns on the barges. The big
shells hung for an instant in the air like birds of prey, and then could
be seen swooping down here and there, while now and anon a shaft of
smoke rose straight to the sky, the black monument of a home.

Here was work in the trenches, digging the flying sap by night and
deepening it by day, for officers and men alike. From heaven a host of
blue ants could be seen toiling in zigzags forward, ever forward, along
the rude water-cuts and through the hills. A waiting carrion from her
vantage point on high marked one spot then another where the blue ants
disappeared, and again one by one came out of the burrow to hurry down
the trench,--each with his ball of clay.

In due time the ring of metal and sepulchred voices rumbled in the
ground beneath the besieged. Counter mines were started, and through the
narrow walls of earth commands and curses came. Above ground the saps
were so near that a strange converse became the rule. It was "Hello,
Reb!" "Howdy, Yank!" Both sides were starving, the one for tobacco and
the other for hardtack and bacon. These necessities were tossed across,
sometimes wrapped in the Vicksburg news-sheet printed on the white
side of a homely green wall paper. At other times other amenities were
indulged in. Hand-grenades were thrown and shells with lighted fuses
rolled down on the heads of acquaintances of the night before, who
replied from wooden coehorns hooped with iron.

The Union generals learned (common item in a siege) that the citizens
of Vicksburg were eating mule meat. Not an officer or private in the
Vicksburg armies who does not remember the 25th of June, and the hour
of three in an afternoon of pitiless heat. Silently