ucceeded in making his escape.

Captain Phelps looked a moment at the Grampus. He saw her wheels move.
She was starting off.

"Out with the starboard gun! Give her a shot!"

Lieutenant Bishop runs his eye along the sights of the great eleven-inch
gun, which has been loaded and run out of the porthole in a twinkling.

There is a flash. A great cloud puffs out into the fog, and the shot
screams through the air and is lost to sight. We cannot see where it
fell. Another--another. Boom!--boom!--boom!--from the Cincinnati and
Carondelet. But the Grampus is light-heeled. The distance widens. You
can hardly see her, and at last she vanishes like a ghost from sight.

We were not more than four or five miles from the head of the island.
One by one the boats rounded to along the Kentucky shore. The sailors
sprang upon the land, carrying out the strong warps, and fastening us to
the trunks of the buttonwood-trees.

There was a clearing and a miserable log-hut near by. The family had
fled, frightened by the cannonade. We found them cowering in the
woods,--a man, his wife and daughter. The land all around them was
exceedingly rich, but they were very poor. All they had to eat was hog
and hominy. They had been told that the Union troops would rob them of
all they had, which was not likely, because they had nothing worth
stealing! They were trembling with fear, but when they found the
soldiers and sailors well-behaved and peaceable, they forgot their
terror.

The fog lifts at last, and we can see the white tents of the Rebels on
the Tennessee shore. There are the batteries, with the cannon grim and
black pointing up stream. Round the point of land is the island. A
half-dozen steamboats lie in the stream below it. At times they steam up
to the bend and then go back again,--wandering back and forth like rats
in a cage. They cannot get past General Pope's guns at New Madrid. On
the north side of the island is a great floating-battery of eight guns,
which has been towed up from New Orleans. General Mackall has sunk a
steamboat in a narrow part of the channel on the north side of the
island, so that if Commodore Foote attempts to run the blockade he will
be compelled to pass along the south channel, exposed to the fire of all
the guns in the four batteries upon the Tennessee shore, as well as
those upon the island.

Two of the mortar-boats were brought into position two miles from the
Rebel batteries. We waited in a fever of expect