doing little harm.  The air was full of noises.  To the right and the left the musketry rattled smartly and petulantly; directly in front it sighed and growled.  To the experienced ear this meant that the death-line was an arc of which the river was the chord.  There were deep, shaking explosions and smart shocks; the whisper of stray bullets and the hurtle of conical shells; the rush of round shot.  There were faint, desultory cheers, such as announce a momentary or partial triumph.  Occasionally, against the glare behind the trees, could be seen moving black figures, singularly distinct but apparently no longer than a thumb.  They seemed to me ludicrously like the figures of demons in old allegorical prints of hell.  To destroy these and all their belongings the enemy needed but another hour of daylight; the steamers in that case would have been doing him fine service by bringing more fish to his net.  Those of us who had the good fortune to arrive late could then have eaten our teeth in impotent rage.  Nay, to make his victory sure it did not need that the sun should pause in the heavens; one of the many random shots falling into the river would have done the business had chance directed it into the engine-room of a steamer.  You can perhaps fancy the anxiety with which we watched them leaping down.

But we had two other allies besides the night.  Just where the enemy had pushed his right flank to the river was the mouth of a wide bayou, and here two gunboats had taken station.  They too were of the toy sort, plated perhaps with railway metals, perhaps with boiler-iron.  They staggered under a heavy gun or two each.  The bayou made an opening in the high bank of the river.  The bank was a parapet, behind which the gunboats crouched, firing up the bayou as through an embrasure.  The enemy was at this disadvantage:  he could not get at the gunboats, and he could advance only by exposing his flank to their ponderous missiles, one of which would have broken a half-mile of his bones and made nothing of it.  Very annoying this must have been—­these twenty gunners beating back an army because a sluggish creek had been pleased to fall into a river at one point rather than another.  Such is the part that accident may play in the game of war.

As a spectacle this was rather fine.  We could just discern the black bodies of these boats, looking very much like turtles.  But when they let off their big guns there was a conflagration.  The river shuddered in its banks, and hurried on, bloody, wounded, terrified!  Objects a mile away sprang toward our eyes as a snake strikes at the face of its victim.  The report stung us to the brain, but we blessed it audibly.  Then we could hear the great shell tearing away through the air until the sound died out in the distance; then, a surprisingly long time afterward, a dull, distant explosion and a sudden silence of small-arms told their own tale.

IV