and accordingly, at five o’clock the signal was given to retire. During the night following this disastrous fight it was confidently expected that the attack would be renewed in the morning; but when the morrow came Admiral Dupont had decided that, for the time, the bombardment of Fort Sumter was at an end. On the 12th of April, then, the whole fleet—with the exception of the Keokuk, which had sunk, and the Ironsides, which was left outside of Charleston Harbor Bay—returned to Port Royal. CAPTURE OF THE REBEL IRONCLAD ATLANTA. JUNE 17. About the middle of June, Admiral Dupont, learning that the Atlanta and other rebel vessels at Savannah, meditated an attack upon the blockading vessels in Warsaw Sound, despatched the Weehawken (Capt. Rogers) and the Nahant (Commander J. Downes), to prevent any disaster to the fleet. The Atlanta, originally a swift and powerful British steamer called the Fingal, had early in the war run the blockade of Savannah, and been converted by the enemy into an iron-clad at a great expense. She was one hundred and ninety-one feet in length, and forty feet beam, somewhat over one thousand tons in measurement, and had a low deck with a casement or covered iron-plated house in the centre, with sloping sides and ends, in which was her battery, consisting of two six-inch and two eight-inch rifled guns. Of these the former were broadside guns, and the latter worked on a pivot, either as broadside or bow or stern guns. She was further armed with a powerful ram, and had attached to her bow a submarine torpedo, charged with about fifty pounds of powder. No efforts had been spared to render her formidable, and it was believed by the enemy that her speed, her heavy armament, and her ram, would render her more than a match for any two vessels of the monitor type. Accordingly at dawn of June 17th, she steamed down the sound; followed by several small steamers containing pleasure parties who were to be the witnesses of the confidently expected triumph of the rebel vessel.