like the sound of far-off, invisible machinery, turning with
a constant motion, not the sharp, shrill whistle of a rifled-bolt, but a
whirr and roll, like that which you may sometimes hear above the clouds
in a thunder-storm. One shell fell like a millstone into the river. The
water did not extinguish the fuse, and a great column was thrown up
fifty feet high. Another buried itself deep in the ground before it
burst, and excavated a great hole. I learned, after the place
surrendered, that one fell through a tent where several officers were
sitting, playing cards, and that the next moment the tent, furniture,
officers, and fifty cartloads of earth were sailing through the air!
None of them were wounded, but they were bruised, wrenched, and their
nice clothes covered with dirt.

At night there was a storm, with vivid lightning and heavy thunder. The
mortars kept up their fire. It was a sublime spectacle,--earth against
heaven, but the artillery of the skies was the best.

You would have given a great deal, I dare say, to have seen all this;
but there is another side to the story. Can you eat dirt? Can you eat
grease in all its forms,--baked, boiled, fried, simmered? Can you bear
variegated butter, variable in taste and smell? Can you get along with
ham, hash, and beans for breakfast, beans, hash, and ham for dinner, and
hash, ham, and beans for supper, week after week, with fat in all its
forms, with cakes solid enough for grape-shot to fire at the Rebels,
with blackest coffee and the nearest available cow fifty miles
off?--with sour molasses, greasy griddle-cakes, with Mississippi water
thick with the filth of the great valley of the West, with slime from
the Cincinnati slaughter-houses, sweepings from the streets, slops from
the steamboats, with all the miasma and mould of the forests? The
fairest countenance soon changes to a milk and molasses color, and
energy lags, and strength becomes weakness under such living.

In boyhood, at the sound of a bugle, a drum, or the roar of a cannon,
how leaped the blood through my veins! But it becomes an old story. I
was quartered within a stone's-throw of the mortars, which fired all
night long, and was not disturbed by the explosions. One becomes
indifferent to everything. You get tired of watching the cannonade, and
become so accustomed to the fire of the enemy, that after a while you do
not heed a shot that ploughs up the dirt or strikes the water near at
hand.

General Pop