except force, and could hardly have come at a wiser moment. But its feebleness was so striking that it did us good service in showing how little we had to fear from that quarter, and that it was possible to reinforce the troops at the fort from the idle defenders of the north line. And so— thanks to General Hoke — fresh men aided the tired soldiers in the fight; and freshening musketry told of the tightening of the Federal grip upon Fort Fisher.
The darkness of night had come upon us while busy in the swamp-jungles, and prolonged our work until a late hour, before the line was made whole again, and the details and reliefs properly arranged and provided for. And it was still later when, at last, we got back to the lines and could rest, watching the belated moon rising over the water. And still the angry crash of musketry came swelling up from the fort; and the constant flashing glimmered like heat-lightning.
Presently came an order to collect shovels to be sent to the fort; and, as we busied ourselves about it, there was a new sound from below—a sound like a distant cheer—and again the same sound from the water, as if the sailors on the fleet were cheering:. The musketry, too, had lulled—was now, at last, silent; and the heat-lightning glimmered no more. What was it? At once, the southern sky seemed full of rockets and many colored lights; and, as the showers of red, white, and blue stars fell into the sea, we knew that the navy was proclaiming Victory!
Victory!—and we proclaimed it, too, bursting into full-throated sympathy, in the contagion of rejoicing, till sea and shore, and the tall, solemn pines, echoed back wilder and heartier cheering than had ever before disturbed a midnight at Federal Point. Our men wanted to leap their breastworks and march on Wilmington at once, midnight as it was, in the fullness of their joy and soldierly ardor.
And so fell Fort Fisher! and with it many an English blockade -running house, and the ephemeral prosperity of Nassau. Our navy gained a fleet of ships that had been tossing perilously off the dangerous mouths of the Cape Fear for four years; and the South lost her supply of foreign arms and clothing and medicines, her active foreign sympathy and her export trade in cotton, and Wilmington—her only mart — was closed at last.
A ROMANCE OF GOPHERTON.
IN 1863 Gopherton was outgrowing its period of placer-mining, roughs, vigilantes, gamblers, and adventurers of every sort. It was, in fact, fast gaining a reputation for solid business prosperity, good -living, piety, and handsome women. It had so far progressed in nineteenth - century civilization that it boasted three churches with paid ministers—one extremely "fashionable"—and dispensed entirely with the ill-compensated labors of home missionaries. Instead of those unseemly revels which tradition imputed to its earlier days, ladies' lunch-parties, church-festivals, and Sunday- schqpl picnics were among its fashionable recreations.
The 12th of May had been set apart for one of these latter. The weather was as bright and sparkling as only California May days can be. Gopherton was all abloom with roses, fuchsias, geraniums, heliotropes, and the thousand beautiful shrubs and plants that attain
