y Ridge. The air was a hornet's nest of screaming shells
with fiery tails. As it lulled a little, out of the woods came eighteen
thousand men in battle-array extending over a mile in length. The
Yankees knew a good thing when they saw it, and they paused to admire
this beautiful gathering of foemen in whose veins there flowed the same
blood as in their own, and whose ancestors had stood shoulder to
shoulder with their own in a hundred battles for freedom.

Their sentiment gave place to shouts of battle, and into the silent
phalanx a hundred guns poured their red-hot messages of death. The
golden grain was drenched with the blood of men no less brave because
they were not victorious, and the rich fields of Pennsylvania drank with
thirsty eagerness the warm blood of many a Southern son.

Yet they moved onward. Volley after volley of musketry mowed them down,
and the puny reaper in the neglected grain gave place to the grim reaper
Death, all down that unwavering line of gray and brown.

They marched up to the Union breastworks, bayoneted the gunners at their
work, planted their flags on the parapets, and, while the Federals
converged from every point to this, exploding powder burned the faces of
these contending hosts, who, hand to hand, fought each other to death,
while far-away widows and orphans multiplied to mourn through the coming
years over this ghastly folly of civil war.

Whole companies of the Confederates rushed as prisoners into the arms of
their enemies, and the shattered remnant of the battered foe retreated
from the field.

While all this was going on in Pennsylvania, Pemberton was arranging
terms of surrender at Vicksburg, and from this date onward the
Confederacy began to wobble in its orbit, and the President of this
ill-advised but bitterly punished scheme began to wish that he had been
in Canada when the war broke out.

In April of the same year Admiral Dupont, an able seaman with massive
whiskers, decided to run the fortifications at Charleston with
iron-clads, but the Charleston people thought they could run them
themselves. So they drove him back after the sinking of the Kennebec and
the serious injury of all the other vessels.

General Gillmore then landed with troops. Fort Wagner was captured. The
54th Regiment of colored troops, the finest organized in the Free
States, took a prominent part and fought with great coolness and
bravery. By December there were fifty thousand colored troops enli