up the ordnance officer of New York for the purpose of ascertaining where the pattern mortar-bed was kept.  “It was rather important, Major,” said Hewitt to me, “that I should have an opportunity of examining this pattern for I had never seen a mortar-bed in my life, but this of course I did not admit to the ordnance officer.”  The pattern required was, it seemed, in the armory at Springfield.  Hewitt wired to Lincoln asking that the bed should be forwarded by the night boat to him in New York.  Hewitt and his men met the boat, secured the pattern bed, and gave some hours to puzzling over the construction.  At noon on Monday, Hewitt wired to Lincoln that he could make thirty mortar-beds in thirty days.  In another hour he received by wire instructions from Lincoln to go ahead.  In twenty-eight days he had the thirty mortar-beds in readiness; and Tom Scott, who had at the time, very fortunately for the country, taken charge of the military transportation, had provided thirty flat-cars for the transit of the mortar-beds to Cairo.  The train was addressed to “U.S.  Grant, Cairo,” and each car contained a notification, painted in white on a black ground, “not to be switched on the penalty of death.”  That train got through and as other portions of the equipment had also been delayed, the mortars were not so very late.  Six schooners, each equipped with a mortar, were hurried up the river to support the attack of the army on Fort Donelson.  A first assault had been made and had failed.  The field artillery was, as Grant had anticipated, ineffective against the earthworks, while the fire of the Confederate infantry, protected by their works, had proved most severe.  The instant, however, that from behind a point on the river below the fort shells were thrown from the schooners into the inner circle of the fortifications, the Confederate commander, Floyd, recognised that the fort was untenable.  He slipped away that night leaving his junior, General Buckner, to make terms with Grant, and those terms were “unconditional surrender,” which were later so frequently connected with the initials of U.S.G.

Buckner’s name comes again into history in a pleasant fashion.  Years after the War, when General Grant had, through the rascality of a Wall Street “pirate,” lost his entire savings, Buckner, himself a poor man, wrote begging Grant to accept as a loan, “to be repaid at his convenience,” a check enclosed for one thousand dollars.  Other friends came to the rescue of Grant, and through the earnings of his own pen, he was before his death able to make good all indebtedness and to leave a competency to his widow.  The check sent by Buckner was not used, but the prompt friendliness was something not to be forgotten.

Hewitt’s mortar-beds were used again a few weeks later for the capture of Island Number Ten and they also proved serviceable, used in the same fashion from the decks of schooners, in the capture of Forts Jackson and St. Philip which blocked the river below New Orleans.  It was only through the fire from these schooners, which were moored behind a point on the river below the forts, that it was possible to reach the inner circle of the works.