look at the bay, the idle, pleasing summer water, with chips and corks and weeds upon it; better to look at the bubbling cask yonder—­much better, captain, if you only knew it!  But the reluctant, heavy iron turret groans and wheezes on its pivotal round, and it will be a minute or half a minute before the throated hell speaks again.  But it will speak:  machinery is fatally accurate to time and place.  Can nothing stay it, or stop the trembling of those bursting iron spheres among yon pretty print-like homes?  No:  look at the buoy, wish-wash, rolling lazily, bobbing in the water, a lazy, idle cask, with nothing in the world to do on this day of busy mischief.  What hands coopered it in the new West? what farmer filled it?  There is the grunting of swine, lowing of cattle, in the look of the staves.  But the turret groans and wheezes and goes around, whether you look at it or not.  What cottage this time?  The soft lap-lap of the water goes on, and the tedious cask gets nearer:  it will slide by the counter.  You have a curious interest in that.  No:  it grates under the bow; it—­Thunder and wreck and ruin!  Has the bay burst open and swallowed us?  The huge, invulnerable iron monster—­not invulnerable after all—­has met its master in the idle cask.  It is blind, imprisoned Samson pulling down the pillars of the temple.  The tough iron plates at the bow are rent and torn and twisted like wet paper.  A terrible hole is gashed in the hull.  The monster wobbles, rolls, gasps, and drinks huge gulps of water like a wounded man—­desperately wounded, and dying in his thirsty veins and arteries.  The swallowed torrent rushes aft, hissing and quenching the fires; beats against the stern, and comes forward with the rush of that repulse to meet the incoming wave.  Into the boats, the water—­anywhere but here.  She reels again and groans; and then, as a desperate hero dies, she slopes her huge warlike beak at the hostile water and rushes to her own ruin with a surge and convulsion.  The victorious sea sweeps over it and hides it, laughing at her work.  She will keep it safely.  That is the unsung epic of the Milwaukee, without which I should have little to say of the submarine diving during the bay-fight.

The harbor of Mobile is shaped like a rude Innuit boot.  At the top, Tensaw and Mobile Rivers, in their deltas, make, respectively, two and three looplike bands, like the straps.  The toe is Bonsecour Bay, pointing east.  The heel rests on Dauphin Island, while the main channel flows into the hollow of the foot between Fort Morgan and Dauphin Island.  In the north-west angle, obscured by the foliage, lay the devoted city, suffering no less from artificial famine, made unnecessarily, than the ligatures that stopped the vital current of trade.  Tons of meat were found putrefying while the citizens, and even the garrison, had been starving on scanty rations.  Food could be purchased, but at exorbitant rates, and the medium of exchange, Confederate notes, all