smashed; the women scooped up the smashings. The river was overflowing the top of the levee. A rain-storm began to threaten. “Are the Yankee ships in sight t” I asked of an idler. He pointed out the tops of their naked masts as they showed up across the huge bend of the river. They were engaging the batteries at Camp Chal-mette—the old field of Jackson’s renown. Presently that was over. Ah, me! I see them now as they come slowly round Slaughterhouse Point into full view, silent, grim, and terrible; black with men, heavy with deadly portent; the long-banished Stars and Stripes flying against the frowning sky. Oh, for the Mississippi! the Mississippi! Just then she came down upon them. But how ? Drifting helplessly, a mass of flames.
The crowds on the levee howled and screamed with rage. The swarming decks answered never a word; but one old tar on the Hartford, standing with lanyard in hand beside a great pivot-gun, so plain to view that you could see him smile, silently patted its big black breech and blandly grinned.
And now the rain came down in sheets. About 1 or 2 o’clock in the afternoon (as I remember), I being again in the store with but one door ajar, came a roar of shoutings and imprecations and crowding feet down Common street. “Hurrah for
zine and Common streets, whose crime was that he looked like a stranger and might be a spy. He was the palest living man I ever saw. They swung him to a neighboring lamp-post, but the Foreign Legion was patroling the town in strong squads, and one of its lieutenants, all green and gold, leaped with drawn sword, cut the rope, and saved the man. This was but one occurrence: there were many like it. I stood in the rear door of our store, Canal street, soon after reopening it. The junior of the firm was within. I called him to look toward the river. The masts of the cutter Washington were slowly tipping, declining, sinking—down she went. The gun-boat moored next to her began to smoke all over and then to blaze. My employers fell into ranks and left the city—left their goods and their affairs in the hands of one mere lad (no stranger would have thought I had reached fourteen) and one big German porter. I closed the doors, sent the porter to his place in the Foreign Legion, and ran to the levee to see the sights.
What a gathering! The riff-raff of the wharves, the town, the gutters. Such women — such wrecks of women! And all the juvenile rag-tag. The lower steamboat landing, well covered with sugar, rice, and molasses, was being rifled. The men
MAJOR-GENERAL BENJAMIN F. BUTLER, U. S. V. Commander of tlie Military forces of tlie New Orleans Expedition.
that had no place to go to or means to go with, was beside itself. “Betrayed! betrayed!” it cried, and ran in throngs from street to street, seeking some vent, some victim for its wrath. I saw a crowd catch a poor fellow at the corner of Maga-
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New Orleans, though the houses were not burning. The firemen were out; but they cast fire on the waters, putting the torch to the empty ships and cutting them loose to float down the river. Whoever could go was going. The great mass,