The doomed city had no rest.  Like clockwork from the Mississippi’s banks beyond came the boom and shriek of the coehorns on the barges.  The big shells hung for an instant in the air like birds of prey, and then could be seen swooping down here and there, while now and anon a shaft of smoke rose straight to the sky, the black monument of a home.

Here was work in the trenches, digging the flying sap by night and deepening it by day, for officers and men alike.  From heaven a host of blue ants could be seen toiling in zigzags forward, ever forward, along the rude water-cuts and through the hills.  A waiting carrion from her vantage point on high marked one spot then another where the blue ants disappeared, and again one by one came out of the burrow to hurry down the trench,—­each with his ball of clay.

In due time the ring of metal and sepulchred voices rumbled in the ground beneath the besieged.  Counter mines were started, and through the narrow walls of earth commands and curses came.  Above ground the saps were so near that a strange converse became the rule.  It was “Hello, Reb!” “Howdy, Yank!” Both sides were starving, the one for tobacco and the other for hardtack and bacon.  These necessities were tossed across, sometimes wrapped in the Vicksburg news-sheet printed on the white side of a homely green wall paper.  At other times other amenities were indulged in.  Hand-grenades were thrown and shells with lighted fuses rolled down on the heads of acquaintances of the night before, who replied from wooden coehorns hooped with iron.

The Union generals learned (common item in a siege) that the citizens of Vicksburg were eating mule meat.  Not an officer or private in the Vicksburg armies who does not remember the 25th of June, and the hour of three in an afternoon of pitiless heat.  Silently the long blue files wound into position behind the earth barriers which hid them from the enemy, coiled and ready to strike when the towering redoubt on the Jackson road should rise heavenwards.  By common consent the rifle crack of day and night was hushed, and even the Parrotts were silent.  Stillness closed around the white house of Shirley once more, but not the stillness it had known in its peaceful homestead days.  This was the stillness of the death prayer.  Eyes staring at the big redoubt were dimmed.  At last, to those near, a little wisp of blue smoke crept out.

Then the earth opened with a quake.  The sun was darkened, and a hot blast fanned the upturned faces.  In the sky, through the film of shattered clay, little black dots scurried, poised, and fell again as arms and legs and head less trunks and shapeless bits of wood and iron.  Scarcely had the dust settled when the sun caught the light of fifty thousand bayonets, and a hundred shells were shrieking across the crater’s edge.  Earth to earth, alas, and dust to dust!  Men who ran across that rim of a summer’s after-noon died in torture under tier upon tier of their comrades,—­and so the hole was filled.