ck-staff
was hid from pilot-house. Before the attack could be renewed, a political
general came down the river with a letter in his pocket from Washington,
by virtue of which he took possession of the three army core, and their
chief, subpoenaed the fleet and the Admiral, and went off to capture
Arkansas Post.

Vicksburg had a breathing spell.

Three weeks later, when the army was resting at Napoleon, Arkansas, a
self-contained man, with a brown beard arrived from Memphis, and took
command. This way General U. S. Grant. He smoked incessantly in his
cabin. He listened. He spoke but seldom. He had look in his face that
boded ill to any that might oppose him. Time and labor be counted as
nothing, compared with the accomplishment of an object. Back to Vicksburg
paddled the fleet and transports. Across the river from the city, on the
pasty mud behind the levee's bank were dumped Sherman's regiments,
condemned to week of ditch-digging, that the gunboats might arrive at the
bend of the Mississippi below by a canal, out of reach of the batteries.
Day in and day out they labored, officer and men. Sawing off stumps under
the water, knocking poisonous snakes by scores from the branches, while
the river rose and rose and rose, and the rain crept by inches under
their tent flies, and the enemy walked the parapet of Vicksburg and
laughed. Two gunboats accomplished the feat of running the batteries,
that their smiles might be sobered.

To the young officers who were soiling their uniform with the grease of
saws, whose only fighting was against fever and water snakes, the news of
an expedition into the Vicksburg side of the river was hailed with caps
in the air. To be sure, the saw and axe, and likewise the levee and the
snakes, were to be there, too. But there was likely to be a little
fighting. The rest of the corps that was to stay watched grimly as the
detachment put off in the little 'Diligence' and 'Silver Wave'.

All the night the smoke-pipes were batting against the boughs of oak and
cottonwood, and snapping the trailing vines. Some other regiments went by
another route. The ironclads, followed in hot haste by General Sherman in
a navy tug, had gone ahead, and were even then shoving with their noses
great trunks of trees in their eagerness to get behind the Rebels. The
Missouri regiment spread out along the waters, and were soon waist deep,
hewing a path for the heavier transports to come. Presently the General
came back to