saw the scene dissolve into a new one.
Through a squall of wind and rain, out from the line of ships, four of
their consorts glided away eastward, flashing and howling, in chase of
the overmatched gunboats, that flashed and howled in retort as they
fled. On the west a Federal flotilla in Mississippi Sound, steaming up
athwart Grant's Pass, opened on Fort Powell and awoke its thunders. Ah,
ah! Kincaid's Battery at last! Red, white and red they sent buffet for
buffet, and Anna's heart was longing anew for their tall hero and hers,
when a voice hard by said, "She's coming back, sir, the _Tennessee_."

Out in the bay the fleet, about to anchor, turned and awaited the new
onset. By the time it was at hand the Mobile gunboats, one burning, one
fled, one captured, counted for nothing, yet on crept the _Tennessee_,
still singling out the _Hartford_, and here the two Callenders, their
boat hovering as near Powell and Gaines as it dared, looked on the
titanic melee that fell round her. Like hounds and hunters on a bear
robbed of her whelps, seventeen to one, they set upon her so thickly
that their trouble was not to destroy one another. Near the beginning
one cut her own flag-ship almost to the water-line. The first that smote
the quarry--at ten knots speed--glanced and her broadside rolled
harmless into the bay, while two guns of her monster adversary let
daylight through and through the wooden ship. From the turret of a
close-creeping monitor came the four-hundred-and-forty-pound bolt of
her fifteen-inch gun, crushing the lone foe terribly yet not quite
piercing through. Another wooden ship charged, hit squarely a tearing
blow, yet slid off, lay for a moment touching sides with the ironclad,
while they lacerated each other like lion and tiger, and then dropped
away. The hunted _Hartford_ gave a staggering thrust and futile
broadside.

So for an hour went the fight; ships charging, the _Tennessee_ crawling
ever after her one picked antagonist, the monitors' awful guns forever
pounding her iron back and sides. But at length her mail began to yield,
her best guns went silent, her smokestack was down, her steering-chains
were gone, Buchanan lay heavily wounded. Of Farragut's twenty-seven
hundred men more than a seventh had fallen, victims mainly of the bear
and her cubs, yet there she weltered, helpless. From her grim disjointed
casemate her valorous captain let down the Southern cross, the white
flag rose, and instantly, everywhe