ng, ramming, priming, aiming, firing,
did well with the bass of that hill-echoing tune. A lieutenant of the
Washington Artillery made himself heard above the roar. "Short range!
We've got short range at last! Now, old smoothbores, show what you are
made of!" The smoothbores showed. Griffin and Ricketts answered,
Jackson's sharpshooters took a part, the uproar became frightful. The
captain of the Rockbridge Artillery was a great-nephew of Edmund
Pendleton, a graduate of West Point and the rector of the Episcopal
Church in Lexington. He went back and forth among his guns. "Fire! and
the Lord have mercy upon their souls.--Fire! and the Lord have mercy
upon their souls." With noise and a rolling smoke and a scorching breath
and a mad excitement that annihilated time and reduced with a
thunderclap every series of happenings into one all-embracing moment,
the battle mounted and the day swung past its burning noon.

The 11th and 14th New York had been pushed up the hill to the support of
Ricketts and Griffin. Behind them showed in strength other climbing
muskets. In the vale below Hampton and Cary had made diversion, had held
the brigades in check, while upon the plateau the Confederates rallied.
The two legions, stubborn and gallant, suffered heavily. With many dead
and many wounded they drew off at last. The goal of the Henry Hill lay
clear before McDowell.

He had brigades enough for the advance that should set all the bells of
Washington ringing for victory. His turning column at Sudley Ford had
numbered eighteen thousand men. But Howard was somewhere in the vague
distance, Burnside was "resting," Keyes, who had taken part in the
action against Hampton, was now astray in the Bull Run Valley, and
Schenck had not even crossed the stream. There were the dead, too, the
wounded and the stragglers. All told, perhaps eleven thousand men
attacked the Henry Hill. They came on confidently, flushed with victory,
brilliant as tropical birds in the uniforms so bright and new, in the
blue, in the gold, in the fiery, zouave dress, in the Garibaldi shirt,
in the fez, the Scotch bonnet, the plume, in all the militia pomp and
circumstance of that somewhat theatrical "On to Richmond." With gleaming
muskets and gleaming swords and with the stars and stripes above them,
they advanced, huzzaing. Above them, on that plateau, ranged beneath the
stars and bars, there awaited the impact six thousand and five hundred
Confederates with sixteen guns.