ere out; but
they cast fire on the waters, putting the torch to the empty ships and
cutting them loose to float down the river.

[Illustration: New Orleans on Approach of Fleet.]

"Whoever could go was going. The great mass 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 Magazine 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 patrolling 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 one occurrence; there were many like
it. I stood in the rear door of our store, Canal Street, soon after
re-opening 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 gunboat moored next
her began to smoke all over and then to blaze. My employers lifted up
their heels 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 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?' 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 Chalmette, 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, so 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,