y imperious outcries from Isaac and
Ben. There followed a mid-air scream and roar as of fifty railway trains
passing each other on fifty bridges, and the next instant a storm of the
enemy's shells burst over and in the batteries. But the house stood fast
and half a dozen misquotations of David and Paul were spouted from the
braver ones of Anna's flock. In a moment a veil of smoke hid ships and
shore, yet fearfully true persisted the enemy's aim. To home-guards,
rightly hopeless of their case and never before in action, every hostile
shot was like a volcano's eruption, and their own fire rapidly fell off.
But on the veranda, amid a weeping, prattling, squealing and gesturing
of women and children, Anna could not distinguish the bursting of the
foe's shells from the answering thunder of Confederate guns, and when in
a bare ten minutes unarmed soldiers began to come out of the smoke and
to hurry through the grove, while riders of harnessed horses and
mules--harnessed to nothing--lashed up the levee road at full run, and
Isaac and Ben proudly cried that one was Mahs' Chahlie and that the
animals were theirs of Callender House, she still asked over the
balustrade how the fight had gone.

For reply despairing hands pointed her back toward the river, and
there, as she and her groaning servants gazed, the great black masts and
yards, with headway resumed and every ensign floating, loomed silently
forth and began to pass the veranda. Down in the intervening garden,
brightly self-contained among the pale stragglers there, appeared the
one-armed reporter, with a younger brother in the weather-worn gray and
red of Kincaid's Battery. They waved a pocket-soiled letter and asked
how to get in and up to her; but before she could do more than toss them
a key there came, not from the ships but from close overhead under a
blackening sky, one last, hideous roar and ear-splitting howl. The
beautiful treasure-laden home heaved, quivered, lurched and settled
again, the women shrieked and crouched or fell prone with covered heads,
and a huge shell, sent by some pain-crazed fugitive from a gun across
the river, and which had entered at the roof, exploded in the basement
with a harrowing peal and filled every corner of the dwelling with
blinding smoke and stifling dust.

Constance and Miranda met Anna groping and staggering out of the chaos.
Unharmed, herself, and no one badly hurt? Ah, hear the sudden wail of
that battery boy as he finds his o