IT is the day before Christmas when the General lays out his line for fortifications. The Roderiquez Canal is no canal at all, but a disused mill race, which an active man can leap and any one may wade. The General will make a moat of it, and raise his breastworks along its mile-length muddy course, between the river and the cypress swamp. He keeps an army of mules and negroes, with scrapers and carts, hard at work, heaping up the earth. A boat load of cotton is lying at the levee. The cotton bales are rolled ashore, and added to the heaped-up earth. This pleases Papa Plauche. “It is singular,” he remarks to neighbor St. Geme, “that cotton, which has been my business support for years, should now defend my life.” There is a low place to the General's front. He cuts the levee; and soon the Mississippi furnishes three feet of water, to serve as a wet drawback to any English advance. The latter, however, are not thinking on an advance. Supports have come dripping from the swamp, and swollen their numbers to threefold the General's force; but none the less their hearts are weak. That horrifying night attack, when their blood was shed in the dark, has broken the heart of their vanity, and a paralyzing fear of those dangerous hunting-shirt men lies all across the English like a cloud. More and worse, the _Carolina_ swings downstream, abreast of their position, and her broadsides drive them to hide in ditches and the cypress borders of the swamp. There is no peace, no safety, on the flat, stubble ground, while light remains by which to point the _Carolina's_ guns. Nor does nightfall bring relief. Those empty-handed Kentuckians must be provided for; and, no sooner does the sun go down, than the hunting-shirt men by two and three go forth in search of English muskets. They shoot down sentries, and carry away their dead belongings. Does an English group assemble round a camp fire, it becomes an invitation seldom neglected. A party of hunting-shirt men creep within range and begin the butchery. There is never the moment, daylight and dark, when the unhappy English are not within the icy reach of death. There is no repose, no safety! A chill dread claims them like a palsy! The English complain bitterly at this bushwhacking; which, to the hunting-shirt men, reared in schools of Indian war, is the merest A B C of battle. The harassed English denounce the General as a barbarian, in whose savage bosom burns no spark of chivalry. They recall how in their late campaigns in Spain, English and French pickets spent peace-filled weeks within fifty yards of one another, exchanging nothing more deadly than coffee and compliments. The grim General refuses to be affected by the French-English example. He continues to pile up his earthworks, while the hunting-shirt men go forth to pot nightly English as usual. The situation wears away the courage of the English to a white and paper thinness.