Shell after shell dropped into the burning building, or exploded among those who were endeavoring to extinguish the flames, and for a time it looked as though another terrible conflagration was inevitable.
When a well directed shell would drop in, and explode where the firemen were at work and scatter them, we would send up a cheer that must have been heard where the flames were raging.
Citizens gathered upon the flat roofs of their dwellings and watched the conflict, between the Charleston firemen on one side, and the crackling flames and General Gilmore’s batteries on Morris Island, on the other.
I saw a man and woman upon their roof near the burning building, and when the shells began to drop in pretty thick and fast, and some of them most uncomfortably near to where they stood, the gentleman seemed to suddenly think of some duty he was obliged to attend to below, while the lady pluckily staid it out. The wonderful accuracy with which General Gilmore sent those immense projectiles into any part of the city, from his batteries on Morris Island, five miles away, was simply astonishing. He seemed to be able to drop them just where he pleased and there was no time, day or night, when the citizens of that doomed city had not good reason to expect that they might receive one of Gilmore’s compliments, as we used to call them. While we were waiting in the Broad Street House for the order to start for Columbia, after we had got all packed up, the officers commenced writing their names on the wall near where they had slept, and being in rather a poetical mood just then, I took my pencil and wrote on the wall in the corner where my quarters had been, the following:
I have slept in this corner for many a night,
A prisoner of war in a pitiful plight,
I have ate my corn dodger, my bacon and rice,
And have skirmished my shirt and my drawers for lice.
Here’s health to Jeff Davis and bad may it be,
May mercy and pardon afar from him flee,
May he find, when too late, to his sorrow and cost,
That not only the Confederacy, but Heaven he’s lost.
CHAPTER XXIX.
exchange on the brain.