Harry heard the report with a thrill.  He knew now that decisive action would come soon enough.  He had always felt that Meade in front of them was a wavering foe, and perhaps too cautious.  But Grant was of another kind.  He was a pounder.  Defeats did not daunt him.  He would attack and then attack again and again, and the diminishing forces of the Confederacy were ill fitted to stand up against the continued blows of the hammer.  Harry’s thrill was partly of apprehension, but whenever he looked at the steadfast face of his chief his confidence returned.

Winter passed without much activity and spring began to show its first buds.  The earth was drying, after melting snows and icy rains, and Harry knew that action would not be delayed much longer.  Grant was in the East now.  He had gone in January to St. Louis to visit his daughter, who lay there very ill, and then, after military delays, he had reached Washington.

Harry afterward heard the circumstances of his arrival, so characteristic of plain and republican America.  He came into Washington by train as a simple passenger, accompanied only by his son, who was but fourteen years of age.  They were not recognized, and arriving at a hotel, valise in hand, with a crowd of passengers, he registered in his turn:  “U.  S. Grant and son, Galena, Ill.”  The clerk, not noticing the name, assigned the modest arrival and his boy to a small room on the fifth floor.  Then they moved away, a porter carrying the valise.  But the clerk happened to look again at the register, and when he saw more clearly he rushed after them with a thousand apologies.  He did not expect the victor of great battles, the lieutenant-general commanding all the armies of the Union, a battle front of more than a million men, to come so modestly.

When Harry heard the story he liked it.  It seemed to him to be the same simple and manly quality that he found in Lee, both worthy of republican institutions.  But he did not have time to think about it long.  The signs were multiplying that the advance would soon come.  The North had never ceased to resound with preparations, and Grant would march with veterans.  All the spies and scouts brought in the same report.  Butler would move up from Fortress Monroe toward Richmond with thirty thousand men and Grant with a hundred and fifty thousand would cross the Rapidan, moving by the right flank of Lee until they could unite and destroy the Confederacy.  Such was the plan, said the scouts and spies in gray.

Longstreet with his corps had returned from the West and Lee gathered his force of about sixty thousand men to meet the mighty onslaught—­he alone perhaps divined how mighty it would be—­and when he was faced by the greatest of his adversaries his genius perhaps never shone more brightly.