mpaigns on record. Knowing that both armies would have to
throw up entrenchments and recuperate, he came home, according to
custom, to rest and freshen for renewed exertion. Leaving immediately
after the battle of Cold Harbor, that is, on June 7th, he was back
again in Washington on June 22d, and in Petersburg, June 26th. The
lines of offence and defence were now twenty miles long, and the great
battle of Petersburg, which was to last many months, the war of shovel
and spade, had begun. Mr. Coffin remained with the army, often riding
to City Point and along the whole front of the Union lines, reading
the news of the sinking of the _Alabama_ by the _Kearsarge_, and the
call of the President for a half million of men, seeing many of the
minor contests, the picket firing, the artillery duels, and learning
of the splendid valor of the black troops.

He came to Washington and Baltimore, when the news of Early's raid up
the Shenandoah Valley was magnified into an invasion of Maryland by
General Lee, with sixty thousand men behind them. Carleton, however,
was not one to catch the disease of fear through infectious
excitement. Finding Grant, the commander-in-chief of all the armies in
the field walking alone, quietly and unostentatiously, with his thumbs
in the armholes of his vest, and smoking a cigar, neither excited nor
disturbed, Carleton felt sure that the raid had been anticipated and
was well provided for. Both then, as well as on July 18th, when he had
to argue with friends who wore metaphorically blue glasses, he wrote
cheerfully and convincingly of his calm, deliberate judgment, that the
prospects of crushing the rebellion were never so bright as at that
moment. He concluded his letter thus, "Give Grant the troops he needs
now, and this gigantic struggle will speedily come to an end."

While Lee, disappointed in the results of Early's menace of
Washington, was summoning all his resources to resist the long siege,
and while Grant was awaiting his reinforcements and preparing the
cordon, which, like a perfect machine, should at the right moment be
set in motion to grind in pieces the armies of rebellion, Carleton was
chosen by the people of Boston to accompany their gift of food which
they wished to send to Savannah, to relieve the needy. Between Tuesday
and Thursday of one week, thirty thousand dollars were contributed.
The steamer _Greyhound_ a captured blockade-runner, was chartered.
Taking in her hold one-half of t