, 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,