Again the eyes of the Nation were fixed on the Army of the Potomac and its new General. The President went down to his headquarters at Falmouth Heights opposite Fredericksburg to review his army of a hundred and thirty thousand men.

Riding up to Hooker\'s headquarters through the beautiful spring morning his weary figure was lifted with new hope as he breathed the perfume of the flowers and blooming hedgerows.

The driver only worried him for the moment. He was swearing eloquently at his team in the pride of his heart at the honor of hauling the Chief Magistrate of the Nation. He swore both plain and ornamental oaths with equal unction.

The President endured it a while in amused silence. He was deeply annoyed, but too much of a gentleman to hurt his patriotic driver\'s feelings.

At last he observed:

"I see you are an Episcopalian, driver."

The man turned in surprise:

"Oh, no, sir, I\'m Methodist."

"Is it possible?"

"Yes, sir, Methodist—why, sir?"

A whimsical smile played about the big kindly mouth:

"I thought you must be an Episcopalian because you swear exactly like Mr. Seward, and he\'s a churchwarden!"

A deep silence fell on the sweet spring air. The driver glanced over his shoulder with a sheepish grin, and cracked his whip without an oath:

"G\'long there, boys!"

As the serried lines of blue, with bayonets flashing in the warming sun of April, marched past the tall giant on horseback, they were in fine spirits. They cheered the President with rousing enthusiasm.

John Vaughan did not join. He marched past with eyes straight in front.

The President hurried back to Washington to keep his vigil from his window overlooking the Potomac, and Hooker began the execution of his skillful plan of attack. On the day his advance began he had one hundred and thirty thousand men and four hundred and forty-eight great guns in seven grand divisions. Lee, still lying on the crescent hills behind Fredericksburg, had sixty-two thousand men and one hundred and seventy guns. He had detached Longstreet\'s corps for service in Tennessee.

The Federal Commander was absolutely sure that he could throw the flower of this magnificent army across the river seven miles above Fredericksburg, get into Lee\'s rear, hurl the remainder of his forces across the river as Burnside had done, and crush the grey army like an egg shell. It was well planned, but in war the unexpected often happens.

Again the unexpected thing turned up in the shape of the strange, dusty figure on his little sorrel horse.

The night before Hooker moved, Julius met with an accident which delayed John\'s supper. He was just approaching the camp after a successful stroll over the surrounding territory, carrying on his back a sheep he meant to cook for the coming march. A rude and unsympathetic guard arrested him. Julius was greatly grieved at his unkind remarks.

"Lordy, man, you ought not ter say things lak dat ter me! I nebber steal nutting in my life. I wasn\'t even foragin\' dis time——"

"The hell you weren\'t!"

"Na, sah. I wasn\'t even foragin\'. I know dat de General done issue dem orders agin hit, an\' I quit long ergo——"

"This sheep looks like it——"

"Dat sheep?"

"That\'s what I said, you black thief!"

"Say, man, don\'t talk lak dat ter me—you sho hurts my feelin\'s. I nebber stole dat sheep. I nebber go atter de sheep, an\' I weren\'t studyin\' \'bout no animals. I was des walkin\' long de road past a man\'s house whar dis here big, devilish-lookin\' old sheep come er runnin\' right at me wid his head down—an\' I lammed him wid er stick ter save my life, sah. An\' den when he fell, I knowed hit wuz er pity ter leave him dar ter spile, an\' so I des nachelly had ter fetch him inter de camp ter save him. Man, you sho is rude ter talk dat way."

The guard was obdurate until Julius began to describe how he cooked roast mutton. He finally agreed to accept his version of the battle with the sheep as authentic if he would bring him a ten pound roast to test the truth of his conversation.

Julius was still harping on the rudeness of this guard as he fanned the flies off John\'s table with a sassafras brush at supper.

"I don\'t know what dey ebber let sech poor white trash ez dat man git in er army for, anyhow!" he exclaimed indignantly.

"We have to take \'em as they come now, Julius. There\'s going to be a draft this summer. No more volunteers now. Wait till you see the conscripts."

"Dey can\'t be no wus dan dat man. He warn\'t no gemman \'tall, sah."

John rose from his hearty supper and strolled along the line of his regiment, recruited again to its full strength of twelve hundred men.

Two fellows who were messmates were scrapping about a question of gravy. One wanted lots of gravy and his meat done brown. The other insisted on having his meat decently cooked, but not swimming in grease. The man in favor of gravy was on duty as cook at this meal and stuck to his own ideas. They suddenly clinched, fell to the ground, rolled over, knocked the pan in the fire and lost both meat and gravy.

John smiled and passed on.

A lieutenant was sitting on a stump holding a letter from his sweetheart to the flickering camp fire. He bent and kissed the signature—the fool! For a moment the old longing surged back through his soul. He wondered if she ever thought of him now. She had loved him once.

He started back to his tent to write her a letter before they broke camp to-morrow morning. Nature was calling in the balmy spring night wind that floated over the waters of the river.

Nature knew naught of war. She was pouring out her heart in budding leaf and blossom in the joy of living.

And then the bitterness of shame and stubborn pride welled up to kill the tender impulse. There were slumbering forces beneath the skin the scenes through which he was passing had called into new life. They were bringing new powers both of mind and body. They added nothing to the gentler, sweeter sources of character. He began to understand how men could feed their ambitions on the bodies of fallen hosts and still smile.

He had felt the brutalizing touch of war. With a cynical laugh he threw off his impulse to write and turned into his blanket dreaming of the red carnival toward which they would march at dawn.

As the sun rose over the new sparkling fields of the South on the morning of the 27th of April, 1863, the great movement began.

The Federal commander ordered Sedgwick\'s division to cross the Rappahannock below Fredericksburg and deploy in line of battle to deceive Lee as to his real purpose while he secretly marched his main army through the woods seven miles above to throw them on his rear.

As the men stood, thousands banked on thousands, awaiting the order to march, John Vaughan saw, for the first time, the grim procession pass along the lines carrying a condemned deserter, to be shot to death before his former comrades. His hands were tied across his breast with rough knotted rope and he was seated on his coffin.

The War Department had gotten around the tender heart in the White House at last. The desertions had become so terrible in their frequency it was absolutely necessary to make examples of some of these men. The poor devil who sat forlornly on his grim throne riding through the sweet spring morning had no mother or sister or sweetheart to plead his cause.

The men stared in silence as the death cart rumbled along the lines. It halted and the man took his place before the firing squad but a few feet away.

A white cloth was bound over his eyes. The sergeant dealt out the specially prepared round of cartridges—all blank save one, that no soldier might know who did the murder.

In low tones they were ordered to fire straight at the heart of the blindfolded figure. The muskets flashed and the man crumpled in a heap on the soft young grass, the blood pouring from his breast in a bright red pool beside the quivering form.

And then the army moved.

The stratagem of the Commander was executed with skill. But there was an eagle eye back of those hills of Fredericksburg. Lee was not only a great stark fighter, he was a past master in the arts of war. He had divined his opponent\'s plan from the moment of his first movement.

By April the 30th, Hooker had effected his crossing and slipped into the rear of Lee\'s left wing. The Southerner had paid little attention to Sedgwick\'s menace on his front. He left but nine thousand men on Marye\'s Heights to hold in check this forty thousand, and by a rapid night march suddenly confronted Hooker in the Wilderness before Chancellorsville.

So strong was the union General\'s position he issued an exultant order to his army in which he declared:

"The enemy must now flee shamefully or come out of his defences to accept battle on our own ground, to his certain destruction."

The enemy had already slipped out of his defenses before Fredericksburg and at that moment was feeling his way through the tangled vines and undergrowth with sure ominous tread.

The soul of the Confederate leader rose with elation at the prospect before him. In this tangle called the Wilderness, broken only here and there by small, scattered farm houses and fields, the Grand Army of the Republic had more than twice his numbers, and nearly three times as many big guns, but his artillery would be practically useless. It was utterly impossible to use four hundred great guns in such woods. Lee\'s one hundred and seventy were more than he could handle. It would be a fight between infantry at close range. The Southerner knew that no army of men ever walked the earth who would be the equal, man for man, with these grey veteran dead shots, who were now silently creeping through the undergrowth of their native woods.

On May the 1st, their two lines came into touch and Lee felt of his opponent by driving in his skirmishers in a desultory fire of artillery.

On the morning of May the 2nd, the two armies faced each other at close range.

With Sedgwick\'s division of forty thousand men now threatening Lee\'s rear from Fredericksburg, his army thus caught between two mighty lines of blue, Hooker was absolutely sure of victory. The one thing of which he never dreamed was that Lee would dare, in the face of such a death trap, to divide his own small army. And yet this is exactly what the Southerner decided to do contrary to all the rules of military science or the advice of the strange, silent figure on the little sorrel horse.

When Lee, Jackson and Stuart rode along the lines of Hooker\'s front that fatal May morning, Jackson suddenly reined in his little sorrel and turned his keen blue eyes on his grey-haired Chief:

"There\'s just one way, General Lee. The front and left are too strong. I can swing my corps in a quick movement to the rear while you attack the front. They will think it a retreat. Out of sight, I\'ll turn, march for ten miles around their right wing, and smash it from the rear before sundown."

Lee quickly approved the amazing plan of his lieutenant, though it involved the necessity of his holding Hooker\'s centre and left in check and that his nine thousand men behind the stone wall on Marye\'s Heights should hold Sedgwick\'s forty thousand. He believed it could be done until Jackson had completed his march.

He immediately ordered his attack on the centre and left of his enemy. The artillery horses were cropping the tender dew-laden grass with eagerness. They had had no breakfast. The riders sprang to their backs at seven o\'clock and they dashed into position.

Lee\'s guns opened the fateful day. For hours his lines blazed with the steady sullen boom of artillery and rattle of musketry. Hooker\'s hosts replied in kind.

At noon a shout swept the Federal lines that Lee\'s army was in retreat. Sickles\' division could see the long grey waves hurrying to the rear. They were close enough to note the ragged, dirty, nondescript clothes Jackson\'s men wore. No man in all the union hosts doubted for a moment that Lee had seen the hopelessness of his position and was hurrying to save his little army of sixty-two thousand men from being crushed into pulp by the jaws of a hundred and thirty thousand in two grand divisions closing in on him. It was a reasonable supposition—always barring the utterly unexpected—another name for Stonewall Jackson, whom they seemed to have forgotten for the moment.

Sickles, seeing the "retreat," sent a courier flying to Hooker, asking for permission to follow the fugitives with his twenty thousand men. Hooker consented, and Sickles leaped from his entrenchments and set out in mad haste to overtake the flying columns. He got nearly ten miles in the woods away from the battle lines before he realized that the ghostly men in grey had made good their escape. Certainly they had disappeared from view.

It was five o\'clock in the afternoon when Jackson\'s swift, silent marchers began to draw near to the unsuspecting right wing of Hooker\'s army under the command of General Howard.

Ned Vaughan was in Jackson\'s skirmish line feeling the way through the tender green foliage of the spring. The days were warm and the leaves far advanced—the woods so dense it was impossible for picket or skirmisher to see more than a hundred yards ahead—at some points not a hundred feet.

The thin, silent line suddenly swept into the little opening of a negro cabin with garden and patch of corn. A kindly old colored woman was standing in the doorway.

She looked into the faces of these eager, slender Southern boys and they were her "children." The meaning of war was real to her only when it meant danger to those she loved.

She ran quickly up to Ned, her eyes dancing with excitement:

"For de Lawd\'s sake, honey, don\'t you boys go up dat road no fudder!"

"Why, Mammy?" he asked with a smile.

"Lordy, chile, dey\'s thousan\'s, an\' thousan\'s er Yankees des over dat little hill dar—dey\'ll kill every one er you all!"

"I reckon not, Mammy," Ned called, hurrying on.

She ran after him, still crying:

"For Gawd\'s sake, come back here, honey—dey kill ye sho!"

She was calling still as Ned disappeared beyond the cabin into the woods redolent now with the blossoms of chinquepin bushes and the rich odors of sweet shrub.

They climbed the little ridge on whose further slope lay an open field, and caught their first view of Howard\'s unsuspecting division. They halted and sent their couriers flying with the news to Jackson.

Ned looked on the scene with a thrill of exultation and then a sense of deepening pity. The boys in blue had begun to bivouac for the night, their camp fires curling through the young green leaves. The men were seated in groups laughing, talking, joking and playing cards. The horses were busy cropping the young grass.

"God have mercy on them!" Ned exclaimed.

It was nearly six o\'clock before Jackson\'s men had all slipped silently into position behind the dense woods on this little slope—in two long grim battle lines, one behind the other, with columns in support, his horse artillery with their big guns shotted and ready.

Ned saw a slight stir in the doomed camp of blue. The men were standing up now and looking curiously toward those dense woods. A startled flock of quail had swept over their heads flying straight down from the lull crest. A rabbit came scurrying from the same direction—and then another. And then another flock of quail swirled past and pitched among the camp fires, running and darting in terror on the ground.

An officer drew his revolver and potted one for his supper.

The men glanced uneasily toward the woods but could see nothing.

"What\'ell ye reckon that means?"

"What ails the poor birds?"

"And the rabbits?"

They were not long in doubt. The sudden shrill note of a bugle rang from the woods and Jackson\'s yelling grey lines of death swept down on their unprotected rear.

The first regiments in sight were blown into atoms and driven as chaff before a whirlwind. Behind them lay twenty regiments in their trenches pointed the wrong way. The men leaped to their guns and fought desperately to stay the rushing torrent. Beyond them was a ragged gap of a whole mile without a man, left bare by the chase of Sickles\' division now ten miles away. Without support the shattered lines were crushed and crumpled and rolled back in confusion. Every regiment was cut to pieces and pushed on top of one another, men, horses, mules, cattle, guns, in a tangled mass of blood and death.

Ned was sent to bring the supporting column to drive them on and on. He mounted a horse and dashed back to the reserve line yelling his call:

"Hurry! Hurry up, men!"

"What\'s the hurry?" growled a grey coat.

"Hurry! Hurry!" Ned shouted. "We\'ve captured fifty pieces of artillery and ten thousand prisoners!"

"Then what\'ell\'s the use er hurryin\' us on er empty stomach—but we\'re a-comin\', honey—we\'re a-comin\'!"

The colonel of a regiment snatched his hat off and was getting his men ready for the charge. He waved his hand toward Ned:

"Make that damn-fool get out of the way. I\'m going to charge. Now you men listen—listen to me, I say! not to that fellow—listen to me!"

Ned could hear him still talking excitedly to his eager men as he dashed back to the battle line.

General Hooker sat on the porch of the Chancellor House, his headquarters. On the east there was heavy firing where his men were attempting to carry out his orders to flank Lee\'s retreating army. Sickles\' and Pleasanton\'s cavalry were already in pursuit. By some curious trick of the breeze or atmospheric conditions not a sound had reached him from the direction of his right wing. A staff officer suddenly turned his glasses to the west.

"My God, here they come!"

Before the astounded Commander could leap from the porch to his horse the flying stragglers of his shattered right were pouring into view—men, wagons, ambulances, in utter confusion. Hooker swung his old division under General Berry into line and shouted to his veterans:

"Forward with the bayonet!"

The sturdy division plowed its way through the receding blue waves of panic-stricken men and dashed into the face of the overwhelming hosts.

Major Keenan, in command of the 8th Pennsylvania Cavalry, charged with his gallant five hundred into the face of almost certain death and held the grey lines in check until the artillery of the Third Corps was saved and turned on the advancing Confederates. He fell at the head of his men.

The fighting now became a battle. It was no longer a rout.

Ned saw a lone deaf man in blue standing bareheaded, fighting a whole army so intent on his work he hadn\'t noticed that his regiment had retreated and left him.

Two men in grey raised their muskets and fired point blank at this man at the same instant. The unconscious hero fell.

"I hit him!" cried one.

"No, I hit him!" said the other.

And they both rushed up and tenderly offered him help.

A grey soldier came hurrying by taking two prisoners to the rear. A cannon ball from the rescued battery cut off his leg and he dropped beside Ned shouting hysterically:

"Pick me up! Pick me up! Why don\'t you pick me up?"

The blue prisoner looked back in terror at the battery and started to run. A grey soldier stopped them:

"Here! Here! What\'ell\'s the matter with you? Them\'s your own guns. What are ye tryin\' to get away from \'em for?"

Men were falling now at every step.

Ned had advanced a hundred yards further when the boy on his right suddenly threw his hands over his head and his leg full to the ground, cut off by a cannon ball, Ned leaped to his side and caught him in his arms. A look of anguish swept his strong young face as he gasped:

"My poor old mother! O my God, what\'ll she do now?"

Ned tied his handkerchief around the mangled leg, twisted the knot, and stayed the blood gushing from the severed arteries, and rushed back to his desperate work.

Four horses dashed by his side dragging through the woods a big gun to ............