on his rear was nothing more than a repetition of the raid on Catlett’s Station.  Striking the Confederate outposts at Kettle Run, he deployed his troops in three lines and pushed briskly forward.  The batteries on both sides opened, and after a hot skirmish of an hour’s duration Ewell, who had orders not to risk an engagement with superior forces, found that his flanks were threatened.  In accordance with his instructions he directed his three brigades to retire in succession across Broad Run.  This difficult manoeuvre was accomplished with trifling loss, and Hooker, ascertaining that Jackson’s whole corps, estimated at 30,000 men, was near at hand, advanced no further than the stream.  Ewell fell back slowly to the Junction; and shortly after midnight the three Confederate divisions had disappeared into the darkness.  The torch had already been set to the captured stores; warehouses, trains, camps, and hospitals were burning fiercely, and the dark figures of Stuart’s troopers, still urging on the work, passed to and fro amid the flames.  Of the value of property destroyed it is difficult to arrive at an estimate.  Jackson, in his official report, enumerates the various items with an unction which he must have inherited from some moss-trooping ancestor.  Yet the actual quantity mattered little, for the stores could be readily replaced.  But the effect of their destruction on the Federal operations was for the time being overwhelming.  And of this destruction Pope himself was a witness.  The fight with Ewell had just ceased, and the troops were going into bivouac, when the Commander-in-Chief, anxious to ascertain with his own eyes the extent of the danger to which he was exposed, reached Bristoe Station.  There, while the explosion of the piles of shells resembled the noise of a great battle, from the ridge above Broad Run he saw the sky to the north-east lurid with the blaze of a vast conflagration; and there he learned for the first time that it was no mere raid of cavalry, but Stonewall Jackson, with his whole army corps, who stood between himself and Washington.

For the best part of three days the Union general had been completely mystified.  Jackson had left Jefferson on the 25th.  But although his march had been seen by the Federal signaller on the hills near Waterloo Bridge,* (* Five messages were sent in between 8.45 A.M. and 11 A.M., but evidently reached headquarters much later.  O.R. volume 12 part 3 pages 654-5.) and the exact strength of his force had been reported, his destination had been unsuspected.  When the column was last seen it was moving northward from Orleans, but the darkness had covered it, and the measure of prolonging the march to midnight bore good fruit.  For the best part of two days Jackson had vanished from his enemy’s view, to be found by Pope himself at Manassas Junction.* (* There is a curious undated report on page 671, O.R. volume 12 part 3 from Colonel Duffie, a French officer in the Federal service, which speaks of a column passing