r handsome, bright George Schaff,--the
delight of all the nicest girls of Richmond; he lay there on Aunt
Eunice's bed on the ground floor, where they had brought him in. He was
not dead,--and he did not die. He is making cotton in Texas now. But he
looked mighty near it then. "The deep cut in his head" was the worst I
then had ever seen, and the blow confused everything. When McGregor got
round, he said it was not hopeless; but we were all turned out of the
room, and with one thing and another he got the boy out of the swoon,
and somehow it proved his head was not broken.

No, but poor George swears to this day it were better it had been, if it
could only have been broken the right way and on the right field. For
that evening we heard that everything had gone wrong in the surprise.
There we had been waiting for one of those early fogs, and at last the
fog had come. And Jubal Early had, that morning, pushed out every man he
had, that could stand; and they lay hid for three mortal hours, within I
don't know how near the picket line at Fort Powhatan, only waiting for
the shot which John Streight's party were to fire at Wilson's Wharf, as
soon as somebody on our left centre advanced in force on the enemy's
line above Turkey Island stretching across to Nansemond. I am not in the
War Department, and I forget whether he was to advance _en barbette_ or
by _echelon_ of infantry. But he was to advance somehow, and he knew
how; and when he advanced, you see, that other man lower down was to
rush in, and as soon as Early heard him he was to surprise Powhatan, you
see; and then, if you have understood me, Grant and Butler and the whole
rig of them would have been cut off from their supplies, would have had
to fight a battle for which they were not prepared, with their right
made into a new left, and their old left unexpectedly advanced at an
oblique angle from their centre, and would not that have been the end of
them?

Well, that never happened. And the reason it never happened was, that
poor George Schaff, with the last fatal order for this man whose name I
forget (the same who was afterward killed the day before High Bridge),
undertook to save time by cutting across behind my house, from Franklin
to Green Streets. You know how much time he saved,--they waited all day
for that order. George told me afterward that the last thing he
remembered was kissing his hand to Julia, who sat at her bedroom window.
He said he thought she migh