had stolen round by night from Centerville.  Here, leading south from these, she descried the sunken Sudley road, that with a dip and a rise crossed the turnpike and Young’s Branch.  There eastward of it the branch turned north-east and then southeast between those sloping fields beyond which Evans and Wheat were presently fighting Burnside; through which Bee, among bursting shells, pressed to their aid against such as Keyes and Sherman, and back over which, after a long, hot struggle, she could see—­could hear—­the aiders and the aided swept in one torn, depleted tumult, shattered, confounded, and made the more impotent by their own clamor.  Here was the many-ravined, tree-dotted, southward rise by which, in concave line, the Northern brigades and batteries, pressing across the bends of the branch, advanced to the famed Henry house plateau—­that key of victory where by midday fell all the horrid weight of the battle; where the guns of Ricketts and Griffen for the North and of Walton and Imboden for the South crashed and mowed, and across and across which the opposing infantries volleyed and bled, screamed, groaned, swayed, and drove each other, staggered, panted, rallied, cheered, and fell or fought on among the fallen.  Here cried Bee to the dazed crowd, “Look at Jackson’s brigade standing like a stone wall.”  Here Beauregard and Johnson formed their new front of half a dozen states on Alabama’s colours, and here a bit later the Creole general’s horse was shot under him.  Northward here, down the slope and over the branch, rolled the conflict, and there on the opposite rise, among his routed blues, was Greenleaf disabled and taken.

All these, I say, were in Anna’s changing picture.  Here from the left, out of the sunken road, came Howard, Heintzelman, and their like, and here in the oak wood that lay across it the blue and gray lines spent long terms of agony mangling each other.  Here early in that part of the struggle—­sent for at last by Beauregard himself, they say—­came Kincaid’s Battery, whirling, shouting, whip-cracking, sweating, with Hilary well ahead of them and Mandeville at his side, to the ground behind the Henry house when it had been lost and retaken and all but lost again.  Here Hilary, spurring on away from his bounding guns to choose them a vantage ground, broke into a horrid melee alone and was for a moment made prisoner, but in the next had handed his captors over to fresh graycoats charging; and here, sweeping into action with all the grace and precision of the drill-ground at Camp Callender, came his battery, his and hers!  Here rode Bartleson, here Villeneuve, Maxime with the colors, Tracy, Sam Gibbs; and here from the chests sprang Violett, Rareshide, Charlie and their scores of fellows, unlimbered, sighted, blazed, sponged, reloaded, pealed again, sent havoc into the enemy and got havoc from them.  Here one and another groaned, and another and another dumbly fell.  Here McStea, and St. Ange, Converse, Fusilier, Avendano, Ned Ferry