d and soared Porter's awful bombs and arched
and howled and fell and scattered death and conflagration. While they
roared, three hundred and forty great guns beside, on river and land,
flashed and crashed, the breezeless night by turns went groping-black
and clear-as-day red with smoke and flame of vomiting funnels, of
burning boats and fire-rafts, of belching cannon, of screaming grape and
canister and of exploding magazines. And through the middle of it all,
in single file--their topmasts, yards, and cordage showing above the
murk as pale and dumb as skeletons at every flare of the havoc, a white
light twinkling at each masthead, a red light at the peak and the stars
and stripes there with it--Farragut and his wooden ships came by the
forts.

"Boys, our cake's all dough!" said a commander in one of the forts.

When day returned and Anna and Flora slept, the murmur they had heard
may after all have been only God's thunder and really not from the
southeast; but just down there under the landscape's flat rim both
forts, though with colors still gallantly flying, were smoking ruins,
all Dixie's brave gunboats and rams lay along the river's two shores,
sunken or burned, and the whole victorious Northern fleet, save one boat
rammed and gone to the bottom, was on its cautious, unpiloted way,
snail-slow but fate-sure, up the tawny four-mile current and round the
gentle green bends of the Mississippi with New Orleans for its goal and
prey.

XLIX

A CITY IN TERROR

Before the smart-stepping lamplighters were half done turning off the
street lights, before the noisy market-houses all over the town, from
Camp Callender to Carrollton, with their basket-bearing thousands of
jesting and dickering customers, had quenched their gaslights and
candles to dicker and jest by day, or the devotees of early mass had
emerged from the churches, Rumor was on the run. With a sort of muffled
speed and whisper she came and went, crossed her course and reaffirmed
herself, returned to her starting-point and stole forth again, bearing
ever the same horrid burden, brief, persistent, unexaggerated: The Foe!
The Foe! In five great ships and twice as many lesser ones--counted at
Quarantine Station just before the wires were cut--the Foe was hardly
twenty leagues away, while barely that many guns of ours crouched
between his eight times twenty and our hundred thousand women and
children.

Yet, for a brief spell, so deep are the ruts of hab