in ceased and, as one of Hilary's songs ran--

"The stars shed forth their light serene."

The ladies had the captain's room, under the pilot-house. Once Anna
woke, and from the small windows that opened to every quarter except up
the bay townward looked forth across the still waters and low shores.
Right at hand loomed Fort Gaines. A league away north-west rose small
Fort Powell, just enough from the water to show dimly its unfinished
parapets. In her heart's vision she saw within it her own Kincaid's
Battery, his and hers. South-eastward, an opposite league away, she
could make out Fort Morgan, but not the Tennessee. The cool, briny air
hung still, the wide waters barely lifted and fell. She returned and
slept again until some one ran along the narrow deck under her reclosed
windows, and a male voice said--

"The Yankee fleet! It's coming in!"

Miranda was dressing. Out on the small deck voices were quietly audible
and the clink of a ratchet told that the boat was weighing anchor. She
rang three-bells. The captain's small clock showed half-past five. Now
the swiftly dressed pair opened their windows. The rising sun made a
golden path across the tranquil bay and lighted up the three forts and
the starry battlecross softly stirring over each. Dauphin Island and
Mobile Point were moss-green and pearly white. The long, low, velvety
pulsations of the bay were blue, lilac, pink, green, bronze. But angry
smoke poured from the funnels of the Tennessee and her three dwarf
consorts, they four also showing the battle-flag, and some seven miles
away, out in the Gulf, just beyond the gleaming eastern point of Sand
Island, was one other sign of unrest.

"You see they're under way?" asked Anna.

Yes, Miranda saw, and sighed with the questioner. For there, once
more--low crouched, war-painted and gliding like the red savages so many
of them were named for, the tall ones stripped of all their upper spars,
but with the pink spot of wrath flickering at every masthead--came the
ships of Farragut.

The two women could not count them, so straight on were they headed, but
a man near the window said there were seven large and seven less, lashed
small to large in pairs. Yet other counting they did, for now out of
Sand Island Channel, just west of the ships, came a shorter line--one,
two, three, four strange barely discernible things, submerged like
crocodiles, a hump on each of the first two, two humps on each of the
others, crossed