ilt to prevent any such movement of the Union troops.

[Illustration: THE FORTS.]

The bluffs of the Mississippi River at Columbus are two hundred feet
high. There the Rebels erected strong batteries, planting heavy guns,
with which they could sweep the Mississippi far up stream, and pour
plunging shots with unobstructed aim upon any descending gunboat. They
called it a Gibraltar, because of its strength. They said it could not
be taken, and that the Mississippi was closed to navigation till the
independence of the Southern Confederacy was acknowledged.

Early in the war it was seen that a fleet of gunboats would be needed on
the Western rivers, and Captain Andrew H. Foote of the navy was placed
in charge of their construction. They were built at Cincinnati and St.
Louis, and taken to Cairo, where they received their armament, crews,
and outfit.

You have heard of Cairo. I do not mean the ancient city on the banks of
the Nile, but the modern town on the tongue of land at the mouth of the
Ohio. Charles Dickens has given a description of the place in one of his
delightful books,--Martin Chuzzlewit. It was a forest, with a few
log-huts, when Mark Tapley resided there, and all the people were
smitten with fever and ague. It is a town now, with several thousand
inhabitants. In the spring the town is sometimes overflowed, and the
people navigate the streets with boats and rafts. Pigs look out of the
chamber windows, and dogs, cats, and chickens live on the roofs of
houses at such times.

Let us take a look at the place as it appeared the first day of
February, 1862. Stand with me on the levee, and look up the broad
Ohio,--the "la belle riviere," as the French called it. There are from
fifty to a hundred steamboats lying along the bank, with volumes of
black smoke rolling up from their tall chimneys, and puffs of steam
vanishing in the air. Among them are the gunboats,--a cross between a
floating fort, a dredging-machine, and a mud-scow. The sailors, who have
been tossed upon the ocean in stately ships, call them mud-_turkles_.
There are thousands of soldiers on the steamboats and on the shore,
waiting for the sailing of the expedition which is to make an opening in
the line of Rebel defences. There are thousands of people busy as bees,
loading and unloading the steamboats, rolling barrels and boxes.

When Mark Tapley and Martin Chuzzlewit were here it was muddy, and it is
muddy now. There is fine, thin, sticky, slimy, s