Let us not get dates confused. "On the twenty-ninth of April," says Grant, "the troops were at Hard Times (Arkansas), and the fleet (another fleet), under Admiral Porter, made an attack upon Grand Gulf (Mississippi), while I reconnoitered." But that twenty-ninth was a year later, when New Orleans for three hundred and sixty-five separate soul-torturing days had been sitting in the twilight of her captivity, often writhing and raving in it, starved to madness for news of Lee's and Stonewall's victories and of her boys, her ragged, gaunt, superb, bleeding, dying, on-pressing boys, and getting only such dubious crumbs of rumor as could be smuggled in, or such tainted bad news as her captors delighted to offer her through the bars of a confiscated press. No? did the treatment she was getting merely--as Irby, with much truth, on that twenty-ninth remarked in a group about a headquarters camp-fire near Grand Gulf--did it merely seem so bad to poor New Orleans? Oh, but!--as the dingy, lean-faced Hilary cried, springing from the ground where he lay and jerking his pipe from his teeth--was it not enough for a world's pity that to her it seemed so? How it seemed to the Callenders in particular was a point no one dared raise where he was. To them had come conditions so peculiarly distressing and isolating that they were not sharers of the common lot around them, but of one strangely, incalculably worse. Rarely and only in guarded tones were they spoken of now in Kincaid's Battery, lately arrived here, covered with the glory of their part in Bragg's autumn and winter campaign through Tennessee and Kentucky, and with Perryville, Murfreesboro' and Stone River added to the long list on their standard. Lately arrived, yes; but bringing with them as well as meeting here a word apparently so authentic and certainly so crushing, (as to those sweet Callenders), that no one ever let himself hint toward it in the hearing even of Charlie Valcour, much less of their battle-scarred, prison-wasted, march-worn, grief-torn, yet still bright-eyed, brave-stepping, brave-riding Major. Major of Kincaid's Battalion he was now, whose whole twelve brass pieces had that morning helped the big iron batteries fight Porter's gunboats. "Finding Grand Gulf too strong," says Grant, "I moved the army below, running the batteries there as we had done at Vicksburg. Learning here that there was a good road from Bruinsburg up to Port Gibson" (both in Mississippi), "I determined to cross--"