Here comes a boat across with a Lieutenant, and two or three privates of the signal corps. Some orders are instantly given the officer, and as instantly telegraphed to the other side by the mysterious wavings and raisings and droppings of the flags. A steamer comes up with pontoons on board, with which a bridge could be speedily thrown across. Unaccountably enough, to on-lookers, she slowly reconnoiters and steams back again. Perhaps, after all it is better to have no bridge there. It simplifies the question, takes escape out of the count, and leaves its victory or death--to the cowards, that slink behind the bluffs as well as to the brave men who peril their lives to do the State some service on the fields beyond. Preparations go rapidly forward for crossing the Division (General Nelson's, which has the advance of Buell's army) on the dozen or so transports that have been tied up along the bank. We have spent but a few minutes on the bluff, but they are the golden minutes that count for years. Well was it for that driven, defeated, but not disgraced army of General Grant's that those minutes were improved. Colonel Webster, Chief of Staff, and an artillery officer of no mean ability, had arranged the guns that he could collect of those that remained to us in a sort of semi-circle, protecting the Landing, and bearing chiefly on our centre and left, by which the Rebels were pretty sure to advance. Corps of artillerists to man them were improvised from all the batteries that could be collected. Twenty-two guns in all were placed in position. Two of them were heavy siege-guns, long thirty-two. Where they came from I do not know; what battery they belonged to I have no idea; I only know that they were there, in the right place, half a mile back from the bluff, sweeping the approaches by the left, and by the ridge Corinth road; that there was nobody to work them; that Doctor Cornyn, Surgeon of Frank Blair's Old First Missouri Artillery, proffered his services, that they were gladly accepted, and that he did work them to such effect as to lay out ample work for scores of his professional brethren on the other side of the fight. Remember the situation. It was half past four o'clock--perhaps a quarter later still. Every division of our army on the field had been repulsed. The enemy were in the camps of four out of five of them. We were driven to within a little over half a mile of the Landing. Behind us was a deep, rapid river. Before us was a victorious enemy. And still there was an hour for fighting. "Oh! that night, or Blucher, would come!" Oh! that night, or Lew. Wallace, would come! Nelson's Division of General Buell's army evidently couldn't cross in time to do us much good. We didn't yet know why Lew. Wallace wasn't on the ground. In the justice of a righteous cause, and in that semi-circle of twenty-two guns in position, lay all the hope we could see.