They saw his ship and her small consort sweep undestroyed over the dead-line, the Brooklyn follow with hers, the Mobile gunboats rake the four with a fire they could not return, and behind them Fort Morgan and the other ships rend and shatter each other, shroud the air with smoke and thresh the waters white with shot and shell, shrapnel, canister and grape.  And then they saw their own Tennessee ignore the monitors and charge the Hartford.  But they beheld, too, the Hartford’s better speed avoid the fearful blow and press on up the channel and the bay, though torn and bleeding from her foe’s broadside, while her own futilely glanced or rebounded from his impenetrable mail.

Wisely, rightly their boat turned and slowly drew away toward Fort Powell and Cedar Point.  Yet as from her after deck they saw the same exploit, at the same murderous cost, repeated by the Brooklyn and another and another great ship and their consorts, while not a torpedo did its work, they tearfully called the hour “glorious” and “victorious” for the Tennessee and her weak squadron, that still fought on.  So it seemed to them even when more dimly, as distance and confusion grew and rain-clouds gathered, they saw a wooden ship ram the Tennessee, but glance off, and the slow Tennessee drop astern, allow a sixth tall ship and small consort to pass, but turn in the wake of the seventh and all but disembowel her with the fire of her great bow gun.

Ah, Anna!  Even so, the shattered, steam-scalded thing came on and the last of the fleet was in.  Yonder, a mere league eastward, it moved up the bay.  Yet proudly hope throbbed on while still Mobile, behind other defenses, lay thirty miles away, while her gunboats still raked the ships, while on Powell, Gaines and Morgan still floated the Southern cross, and while, down in the pass, still unharmed, paused only for breath the Tennessee.

“Prisoners! they are all our prisoners!” tearfully exulted the fond Callenders.  But on the word they 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.”