ranks of the assailants first wavered, and then stopped to open a rapid but wild and diminishing fire against the barricade.  For a moment or two their colors waved defiantly at their front as their officers rode among them in the vain endeavor to hold them to the hopeless effort; and then they turned and vanished into the deep recesses of the forest whence they came.  Not as they came, however, but as a flying multitude of panic-stricken men, insensible to authority, conscious only of their defeat and their peril.

Ah! but this was quite different from yesterday’s work, thought the men of Hazen’s brigade.  It is one thing to march up to an enemy waiting to receive you on his chosen ground, and another to lie quietly in position and let your enemy feel his way up until he is within fair range.  This was the thought after the successful defence:  before the fight it is a question whether it does not require greater steadiness of nerve to wait inactive for an attack than to rush forward in an onslaught.  Officers and men in Palmer’s division were in excellent spirits.  They saw that their comrades on the right and the left had met with equally good fortune.  Johnson’s division on one side and Reynolds’s on the other remained as steady as rocks.

It was nearly eleven o’clock, and all had prospered with us thus far.  The enemy was getting his share of bloody repulses, of which we had had more than enough the day before.  The attacks upon our line had begun upon the left, and were traveling toward our right.  The two armies were thus brought together gradually, something after the manner of scissor-blades when they are slowly closed.  The four divisions on the left had already successfully withstood the shock, which it was to be supposed the enemy had made as heavy as possible at that point, since the left was the vital point of the whole line.  Success there would give him the line of retreat to Chattanooga, with Rosecrans’s entire army shut out.  Besides, we knew that the line was stronger toward the right, where at least two divisions were in reserve.  No one apprehended disaster, therefore, when a long and rapid roll of musketry far to the right told that the enemy was attacking there.  “Brannan and Wood are attending to ’em now!” said General Palmer, standing in a group of officers in rear of Hazen’s brigade.  The talk went on as before—­about the successful defences of the morning, the barricade, Baird’s splendid recovery, etc.  But soon everybody was listening anxiously to the sounds of the battle on the right.  The roar of musketry had worked round until it was behind our right shoulders as we stood facing to our front.  There could be no doubt about it:  the line had given way somewhere on the right, and the enemy was following up.  It was not long before stray bullets were singing behind and among us, flying in a direction parallel to our line.  Then, all in a moment, a battery far to the right and rear opened a rapid fire, and some of its shells came shrieking