The sky was hidden by a canopy of smoke, streaked with flames. Heaps of burning cotton, sugar, salt meats, spirits, provisions of all kinds lined the levee. In the river the shipping, tug-boats, and gun-boats, floated down the current in flames. Molasses, running like water, flushed the gutters. All night the city had glowed in the lurid light of her own incendiarism. The little children, seeing the gleams through the closed windows, and hearing the cannons from the forts, trembled in their beds in terrified wakefulness. Deserted by their parents, and shrinking instinctively from their negro nurses, they asked one another in whispers: "Will the Yankees kill us all?"
The next morning, from old Christ Church belfry, on Canal street, the bell tapped the alarm. Mothers called their children to them, and, sitting behind closed doors, listening, counting, cried, "The Yankees are here!" The children, horrified to see a mother weep, cried aloud, too, despairingly, "The Yankees are here!" Slaves, rushing out, leaving the houses open, disordered, behind them, shouted triumphantly to one another, "The Yankees are here!"
The rabble, holding riot in the streets; men, women, and children, staggering under loads of pilferings from the conflagration, cried, too, "The Yankees are here!"
Early in the morning officers came from the flag-ship, bearing a summons to surrender. The mayor deferred to the military authority in command. The Confederate general, evacuating the city with his army, put the responsibility back upon the mayor. During the colloquy in the city hall, the populace surged and raged in the streets outside, hurling insults, imprecations,
