The people were asking:  “Where is the army of the Potomac?  What can it be doing, that the invasion goes on so long unchecked?” At Gettysburg this patient, longsuffering army gave its answer.

Meanwhile the North was brought face to face with the direst possibilities, and its fears, which history has proved to be just, were aroused to the last degree.  The lull in the excitement which had followed the first startling announcement of invasion was broken by the wildest rumors and the sternest facts.  The public pulse again rose to fever-heat.  Farmers were flying into Harrisburg, before the advancing enemy; merchants were packing their goods for shipment to the North; and the panic was so general that the proposition was made to stop forcibly the flight of able-bodied men from the Pennsylvanian capital.

As Mr. Vosburgh read these despatches in the morning paper, Marian smiled satirically, and said:  “You think that Mr. Merwyn is under some powerful restraint.  I doubt whether he would be restrained from going north, should danger threaten this city.”

And many believed, with good reason, that New York City was threatened.  Major-General Doubleday, in his clear, vigorous account of this campaign writes:  “Union spies who claimed to have counted the rebel forces as they passed through Hagerstown made their number to be 91,000 infantry and 280 guns.  This statement, though exaggerated, gained great credence, and added to the excitement of the loyal people throughout the Northern States, while the disloyal element was proportionately active and jubilant.”  Again he writes:  “There was wild commotion throughout the North, and people began to feel that the boast of the Georgia Senator, Toombs, that he would call the roll of his slaves at the foot of Bunker Hill Monument, might soon be realized.  The enemy seemed very near and the army of the Potomac far away.”  Again:  “The Southern people were bent upon nothing else than the entire subjugation of the North and the occupation of our principal cities.”

These statements of sober history are but the true echoes of the loud alarms of the hour.  On the morning of the 20th of June, such words as these were printed as the leading editorial of the New York Tribune:  “The rebels are coming North.  All doubt seems at length dispelled.  Men of the North, Pennsylvanians, Jerseymen, New-Yorkers, New-Englanders, the foe is at your doors!  Are you true men or traitors? brave men or cowards?  If you are patriots, resolved and deserving to be free, prove it by universal rallying, arming, and marching to meet the foe.  Prove it now!”

Marian, with flashing eyes and glowing cheeks, read to her father this brief trumpet call, and then exclaimed:  “Yes, the issue is drawn so sharply now that no loyal man can hesitate, and to-day Mr. Merwyn cannot help answering the question, ’Are you a brave man or a coward?’ O papa, to think that a man should be deaf to such an appeal and shrink in such an emergency!”