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174 semblance of a ship had gone out of her. The roar of bursting shells was continuous. From side to side and from end to end they tore through her quivering frame and laughed at her dying agony.

And I am told that what happened to her happened at the head of the surviving line, until the last ship had gone,—the column melting away before that concentrated fire like a bar of sealing wax before a blowpipe.

I remember, as the noble ship keeled swiftly over, how the fire-control platform described a mighty arc through the air, and flung us into the shell-lashed waters. My last recollection of that holocaust is of seeing the Arkansas, flashing from stem to stern with the burst of high-explosive shell as she swept by. Then a shell fragment grazed my head.

The water, or I know not what, brought