fortress was a
huge double-turreted monitor, with a ponderous, crushing projectile
force in her. Her battery of four fifteen-inch guns, and the tough,
insensible solidity of her huge wrought-iron turrets and heavy plated
hulk, burdened the sleepy waters of the bay. Upon a time she braced
her iron jacket about her, girded her huge sides with fifteen-inch
pistolry, and went rolling her clumsy volume down the bay to mash Fort
Taylor to rubbish and debacle. The sea staggered under her ponderous
gliding and groaned about her massive bulk as she wended her awkward
course toward the bay-shore over against the fort. She sighted her
blunderbusses, and, rolling, grunting, wheezing in her revolving
towers like a Falstaff ill at ease, spat her gobbets of flame and
death. The poor little water-spaniel fort ran down to the shore and
barked at her of course. _Cui bono_ or _malo?_ Why, like Job's mates,
fill its poor belly with the east wind, or try to draw out leviathan
with a hook, or his tongue with a cord thou lettest down? Yet who
treads of the fight between invulnerable Achilles and heroic Hector,
and admires Achilles? The admiral of the American fleet, sick of the
premature pother, signaled the lazy solidity to return. The loathly
monster, slowly, like a bull-dog wrenched from his victim, rolled
snarling, lazily, leisurely down the bay, not obeying and yet not
disobeying the signal.

All along the sunny coast, like flowers springing up in a
battle-field, were rows of little white cottages, tenanted by women
and children--love, life and peace in the midst of ruin and sudden
death. At the offending spectacle of homely peace among its enemies
the unglutted monster eased its huge wrath. Tumbling and bursting
among the poor little pasteboard shells of cottages, where children
played and women gossiped of the war, and prayed for its end, no
matter how, fell the huge globes and cones of murder. Shrieks and
cries, slain babes and wounded women on shore; surly, half-mutinous
officers and crew on that iron hulk, shocked at the fell work they
were set to do; and the glimmer and wash of the bay-water below--that
sweet, tranquil, half-transparent liquid, with idle weeds and chips
upon it, empty crates and boxes of dead merchandise, sacked of their
life and substance by the war, as one might swallow an oyster; the
soft veils of shadowy ships and the distant city spires; umbrageous
fires and slips of shining sand all mirrored in the soft and