A catastrophe of similar character, not quite so appalling in results, had occurred on the Atlantic coast only three weeks previous. The steamer General Lyon, from Wilmington, bound for Fortress Monroe, burned to the water's edge off Cape Hatteras, on the night of March 31st. Out of five hundred on board, over four hundred of them soldiers, only twenty escaped. Among the lost were eleven officers and one hundred and ninety-five men belonging to the Fifty-sixth Illinois, with nearly two hundred released Union prisoners.

"CROW'S NEST," AN ARMY OBSERVATORY, NEAR PETERSBURG.
(From a War Department photograph.)

THE HERO OF BURNSIDE'S MINE.

In the ranks of the Forty-eighth Pennsylvania, the regiment which placed the powder magazine of Burnside's mine, at Petersburg, underneath the doomed Confederate fort, was a sergeant known as Harry Reese.

He had been the first to propose the mine seriously. Permission to construct it having been granted at headquarters, he, with a score of his fellows, all experienced coal miners, set to work with their ordinary camp tools, and, under cover of night, in one month excavated, concealed from the enemy's eyes, eighteen thousand cubic feet of earth, creating a tunnel nearly six hundred feet long. On two occasions Reese, by personal effort, saved the enterprise from failure; once when the shaft opened into a bed of quicksand, and again when the army engineers through faulty measurements located the powder-chamber outside the limits of the fort to be destroyed, instead of directly under it.

Finally came the hour for the explosion. The troops stood ready to charge into the breach, and the long fuse was ignited by Reese, who, with a group of his mining companions, stayed at the mouth of the shaft, awaiting the result. Generals and aids anxiously studied their watch-dials, that would show the flight of moments beyond the appointed time. Grant telegraphed from army headquarters over his special field-wire: "Is there any difficulty in exploding the mine?" and again: "The commanding general directs, if your mine has failed, that your troops assault at once."

The mine had failed. Daylight was spreading over the trenches, and the enemy were alert even to the point of expecting an assault.

Reese drew his soldier's clasp dirk, and, turning to a comrade, said: "I am going into the mine. If it don't blow up, give me time to reach the splice in the fuse, and then come to me with fresh fuse and twine." He creeps into the shaft with resolute caution, following up the tell-tale streak of black ashes, which shows that the fuse has surely burned its way toward the powder-cells in the chamber beyond. It may reach there any second, and then! At last, just ahead of him, the brave miner sees a stretch of fuse outwardly uncharred. A fine thread of flame may be eating through its core, nevertheless, one spark of which is enough to set the terrible train ablaze. Reese knows this, for a man accustomed to handling powder cannot for an instant lose consciousness of its quick and awful violence when the connecting flash is struck. He knows his peril, yet presses on, and with his blade severs the fuse beyond the charred streak. Danger for that moment is over.

The delay had been caused by a splice wound so tightly that the fire could not eat through freely. He made a new short fuse, relit the flashing string, and escaped to the mouth of the tunnel, just as the magazine chambers exploded, spreading a mass of ruins where the armament of Lee had stood grim and threatening in the morning light but a moment before.

The fort thus destroyed was occupied by Capt. R. G. Pegram's Virginia battery, and the trenches—which means the system of walled ditches, bomb proofs, and other shelter for troops on both sides of the battery—by the Eighteenth and Seventy-second South Carolina infantry. These men, numbering several hundred, lay sound asleep, all except the sentinels. The battery and the sections of work adjoining were hoisted into the air, and two hundred and eighty-eight officers and soldiers were buried in the débris, while their comrades who escaped injury fled in confusion, leaving a defenceless gap in the line twenty or thirty rods wide, into which Burnside's corps charged without a moment's hesitation.