and eagerly grasping the fallen staff, indifferent of the fate that awaited them.  Officers are in front, with drawn swords flashing in the gleam of the fading sunlight, urging on their men to still greater deeds of prowess, and by their individual courage set examples in heroism never before witnessed on this continent.  The assault upon Mayree’s Hill by the Irish Brigade and their compatriots will go down in history as only equalled by the famous ride of the “Six Hundred at Hohenlinden,” and the “Charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava.”  They forge their way forward over the heap of dead and dying that now strew the plain, nearer to the deadly wall than any of the troops before them.  It began to look for the moment as if their undaunted courage would succeed, but the courage of the defenders of Mayree’s Hill seemed to increase in ardour and determination in proportion to that of the enemy.  The smoke and flame of their battle is now less than one hundred paces from the wall, but the odds are against them, and they, too, had to finally yield to the inevitable and leave the field in great disorder.

From both sides hopes and prayers had gone up that this charge would prove the last attempt to break our lines.  But Humphries met the shattered columns with a fresh advance.  Those who were marching to enter this maelstrom of carnage were entreated and prayed to by all of those who had just returned from the sickening scene not to enter this death trap, and begged them not to throw away their lives in the vain attempt to accomplish the impossible.  But Humphries, anxious of glory for himself and men, urged on by the imperative orders from his Commander-in-Chief, soon had his men on the march to the “bloody wall.”  But as the sun dropped behind the hills in our rear, the scene that presented itself in the fading gloom of that December day was a plain filled with the dead and dying—­a living stream of flying fugitives seeking shelter from the storm of shot and shell by plunging over the precipitous banks of the river, or along the streets and protecting walls of the city buildings.

Jackson had pressed all in his front back to the water’s edge, while his batteries, with those of Stuart’s, were still throwing shells into the huddled, panic-stricken, and now thoroughly vanquished army of the enemy.

That night the Federal Commander-in-Chief sat in his tent alone, and around him the groans of the wounded and the agonizing wails of the dying greet his ear—­the gentle wind singing a requiem to his dead.  He nursed alone the bitter consciousness of the total defeat of his army, now a scattered mass—­a skeleton of its former greatness—­while the flower of the Northern chivalry lie sleeping the sleep of death on the hills and plains round about.  His country and posterity would charge him with all the responsibility of defeat, and he felt that his brief command of the once grand and mighty Army of the Potomac was now at an end.  Sore and bitter recollections!