But no such voices reached the party surrounded by the glittering staff. The subjugation was as yet too fresh and real. One had to mingle with them to find how sore they were at the degradation of being guarded by these runaway slaves of theirs. To be conquered by the Yankees was humiliating, but to have their own negroes armed and set over them they felt to be cruel and wanton insult. Yet they scarcely dared still to speak of it above whispers, and their combination of rage and helplessness would have been ludicrous, but for its dark suggestions of the future. The review occurred early in the morning, and the heat did not seem oppressive to us, quietly remaining about the hotel; but a portion of our party who were out riding found it intense, and in the course of the day there were several deaths in the suburbs, chiefly among Northern men, from sun-stroke. But the general testimony of Northerners in Mobile is to the effect that they find but little difference between people from the different sections in their capacity for enduring the heat. Only its long continuance, they say, and not its intensity, makes the Southern summer dangerous to Northern men. General Andrews, three or four years ago a briefless young lawyer in a remote Minnesota village—such have been the rapid promotions the war has offered—showed us through the portions of the city destroyed, only a week or two before, by perhaps the most destructive explosion that ever devastated any American city. How it originated will be forever a mystery. Every one who might explain it perished. There were large quantities of ammunition stored near the upper end of the landing, and in the heart of the cotton warehouses. One of the concealed torpedoes left by the Rebels may have been touched; Rebels may themselves have stealthily arranged a system of wires to explode it; a percussion shell may have been dropped; some reckless dare-devil may have been smoking a cigar. However it occurred, there was a sudden roar in the midst of the busy throng of workmen and soldiers, and one common, instantaneous destruction overwhelmed them all. Over four-fifths of the entire storage of the city was destroyed. A hundred mules were buried in a single corral. Days afterward corpses of here and there a hapless soldier began to be dug out by those who cared to risk exposure to the scattered shells still hourly exploding. Even when we drove down into the ruins we heard now and again a dull, heavy thud, like the stroke of some ponderous weight against the solid earth. It was a shell buried far beneath the rubbish of fallen houses, and fired by the heat that still smouldered across whole squares.