ouse. Hooker, his face covered with dust and sweat, galloping
up, leaping from his horse, and rushing to Burnside; the
commander-in-chief striding up and down, looking toward Marye's Hill,
enveloped in smoke, and repeating to himself, as if he were scarcely
conscious of what he was saying: "That height must be taken! That
height must be taken! We must take it!"

He turned to Hooker with the same words, "That height must be taken
to-day," repeating it over and over again, changing the words perhaps,
but not the sense. The gallant but unfortunate man had not wanted to be
commander-in-chief, foreseeing his own inadequacy, and now in his agony
at seeing so many of his men fall in vain he was scarcely responsible.

Hooker, his heart full of despair, but resolved to obey, galloped
back and prepared for the last desperate charge up Marye's Hill. The
advancing mists in the east were showing that the short winter day would
soon draw to a close. He planted his batteries and opened a heavy fire,
intending to batter down the stone wall. But the wall, supported by an
earthwork, did not give, and Longstreet's riflemen lay behind it waiting.

At a signal the Union cannon ceased firing and the bugles blew the
charge. The Union brigades swarmed forward and then rushed up the
slopes. The volume of fire poured upon them was unequalled until
Pickett led the matchless charge at Gettysburg. Pickett himself was
here among the defenders, having just been sent to help the men on
Marye's Hill.

Up went the men through the winter twilight, lighted now by the blaze
of so many cannon and rifles pouring down upon them a storm of lead and
steel, through which no human beings could pass. They came near to the
stone wall, but as their lines were now melting away like snow before
the sun, they were compelled to yield and retreat again down the slopes,
which were strewed already with the bodies of so many of those who had
gone up in the other attacks.

Every charge had broken in vain on the fronts of Jackson and Longstreet,
and the Union losses were appalling. Harry knew that the battle was won
and that it had been won more easily than any of the other great battles
that he had seen. He wondered what Jackson would do. Would he follow
up the grand division of Franklin that he had defeated and which still
lay in front of them?

But he ceased to ask the question, because when the last charge,
shattered to pieces, rolled back down Marye's