regulate impressment. Flour, $27 per barrel; fat, corn-fed hogs, $40 per hundredweight. Square or round iron, net ton, $35; Berlin

plate, per net ton, $500; first-class artillery horses, $600; first-class cavalry horses, same; second-class, $500; four-horse iron-axle wagons, $300.

M. C. MEIGS,

Quartermaster-General.

CHATTANOOGA, TENN., October 5, 1863-8 p.m.

(Via Murfreesborough, 11 a.m., 8th. Received 9.25 p.m.)

Honorable E. M. STANTON,

Secretary of War:

The first day's bombardment of Chattanooga is over, and I have not been able to learn that any one has been injured. About 10 a.m., while watching the construction of a pontoon bridge whose planks have been sawed by the volunteers in the two steam saw-mills captured in this town, and whose pontoons have been constructed on the river bank by these same volunteers, I heard the sound of heavy guns. As the firing continued for some time, I went to one of the inclosed works constructing in the defenses of this place to find out what it was.

From the sides of Lookout Mountain on the west, a number of guns, one or two of them very heavy, were firing toward the camps on General Rosecrans' right. Also a heavy rifle was firing slowly from the base of Mission Ridge to the south, and two light rifled pieces were being run occasionally to the crest or on the side of a knoll some 600 or 800 yards distant southeast of the work, to which as a good lookout, I had gone. No shell had entered this work when I left at 2. The men said one had struck the parapet of a line of defense a couple of hundred yards to the right, and Bradley's battery of rifled field pieces fired one shot while I was present, which grazed the top of the knoll, and for a time quieted the rebel field pieces behind it. Two of the shells burst.

Later in the day the fire was more rapid, and more of the shell from the mountain burst in the air over the camps occupied by the troops. Eight or ten guns, if not more, opened from the mountain. They appeared to be planted singly at many yards' intervals along the road which wound up the mountain side. I went back, after watching the firing for an hour or two, to observe the progress of the brigade-builders, and toward sunset, with General Wagner, took a position on Cameron's Hill, a high peak on the bank of the river west of Chattanooga, and commanding the whole plain of Chattanooga. By the sound I found that the most distant gun, some 1,500 feet above the river on Lookout Mountain, was distant from Cameron's Hill 2.7 miles and the large rifle on Mission Ridge was from the same point just 3 miles distant. This wound make their distance from our extreme right about 2 1/2 and 3 miles, respectively.

No one seems to have made it his business to count the number of shots fired in the forenoon. They seemed to be firing deliberately and for range. About 2 o'clock I counted twelve explosions in three minutes, some of which may have been from our own guns, which replied at intervals. As the firing began at 10 and ceased only at sunset, I presume that some hundreds of shots were fired in the seven