Or a tin of coffee,
and once it was the mayor's fluted petticoats, which we tried on, and
found very heavy. We could not discover what he did for pockets.
All of these things, and the house itself, were burned to ashes, we
were told, a few hours after we retreated, and we feel less troubled
now at having made such free use of them.
On the morning of the 4th we were awakened by the firing of cannon
from a hill just over our heads, and we met in the middle of the room
and solemnly shook hands. There was to be a battle, and we were the
only correspondents on the spot. As I represented the London Times,
Bass was the only representative of an American newspaper who saw
this fight from its beginning to its end.
We found all the hills to the left of the town topped with long lines
of men crouching in little trenches. There were four rows of hills.
If you had measured the distance from one hill-top to the next, they
would have been from one hundred to three hundred yards distant from
one another. In between the hills were gullies, or little valleys,
and the beds of streams that had dried up in the hot sun.
