Bailey destroyed one of his assailants with an eleven-inch shell. Has the reader any conception of what it means to have an eleven-inch shell penetrate the side of a vessel and explode within its wooden walls? In every eleven-inch shell there is a charge of gunpowder of positively earthquake-producing proportions, and when it explodes it wrecks everything within hundreds of feet of it. Exploding within a vessel it dismounts guns, kills men, rips up bulwarks and bulkheads, and renders the ship a helpless wreck, with fire everywhere to complete the destruction. That is what happened to one of the ships that assailed Captain Bailey. Another was driven off, and before the third could accomplish its purpose the _Oneida_ and the _Varuna_ came to the rescue. The _Oneida_ rammed one of the Confederate vessels, cutting it in two. The _Varuna_ had worse fortune. She was successfully rammed by the Confederates, and running ashore, sank helplessly. The _Pensacola_ sustained a loss of thirty-seven men in passing the forts, a fact that eloquently testified to the vigor that abode in those works after Porter's six days' hail of great shells into their precincts. The _Mississippi_, of Farragut's fleet, was rammed and disabled by the Confederate iron-clad _Manassas_. But, by way of revenge, the _Mississippi's_ guns riddled the ram and destroyed it. In the meanwhile the Confederates were sending down fire-rafts in great numbers, and in an attempt to avoid contact with two of these Farragut's flagship, the _Hartford_, ran aground upon a mud bank and for a time lay helpless in an exceedingly perilous position. If the reader would fully understand the terror of this "river fight" he should remember that at the point where it occurred the Mississippi is only about half a mile wide. Everything done at all in such a stream must be done at close quarters, and it was at the very closest of quarters that the Northern and Southern Americans who contested that fight met each other on that terrible morning of April 24, 1862. The men who fought there in the river on the one side or upon the other, are mostly dead now; only a few of them survive in soldiers' homes or sailors' snug harbors. Surely we can do no better in this new century than pay all possible honor to the valor with which, on the one side and upon the other, they fought for their respective causes on that soft spring morning in the early sixties. They were heroes all, and right heroically did they acquit themselves in the brutal and bloody work they were set to do. The net result of the contest was the destruction of the Confederate fleet. With that out of the way Farragut pushed on to New Orleans and with guns out for action, demanded the city's surrender.