Fancy twenty-four thousand guns thundering at each other.

Fancy the sky red with the fires of hundreds of thousands of blazing, brazen meteors; the air thick with impenetrable smoke--the universe almost in a flame! for the noise of the cannonading was heard on the peaks of the Andes, and broke three windows in the English factory at Canton.

Boom, boom, boom! for three days incessantly the gigantic--I may say, Cyclopean battle went on: boom, boom, boom, bong! The air was thick with cannon-balls: they hurtled, they jostled each other in the heavens, and fell whizzing, whirling, crashing, back into the very forts from which they came.

Boom, boom, boom, bong--brrwrrwrrr! On the second day a band might have been seen (had the smoke permitted it) assembling at the sally-port of Fort Potato, and have been heard (if the tremendous clang of the cannonading had allowed it) giving mysterious signs and countersigns.

"Tom," was the word whispered, "Steele" was the sibilated response.