ent of the air
distinctly."

And thus the "Narrative" recites as to the third and last day of the
battle:

"I had been struck upon the thigh by a bullet which I think must have
glanced and partially spent its force upon my saddle. It had pierced
the thick cloth of my trousers, and two thicknesses of underclothing,
but had not broken the skin, leaving me with an enormous bruise, that
for a time benumbed the entire leg. At the time of receiving it, I
heard the thump, and noticed it, and the hole in the cloth into which
I thrust my finger, and I experienced a feeling of relief when I
found that my leg was not pierced."

We shudder when we think what might have happened to that leg, if the
bullet, when it saw Haskell, had not so kindly glanced and spent its force
on his saddle before piercing the thick cloth of his breeches, and the two
thicknesses of his underclothing.

The second and third days brought scant renown to such an ambitious
officer as First Lieut. Haskell, but immortal fame is very chary with her
favors. She tries a man long, and she tries him hard, before wreathing his
brow with the laurel of victory, and fitting him for a niche in the Temple
of Fame. Haskell realized all this at the close of the battle on this
afternoon of July third, and he evidently concluded to create a niche for
himself in the holy of holies by a page or two of romance in his
"Narrative," and so he planned it all out.

Haskell knew--none better than he--that the Philadelphia Brigade met and
repulsed the brunt of the charge of Pickett's Division, but he would
immortalize himself as a hero by recording in his "Narrative," that the
Brigade broke from the "Bloody Angle" without orders or reason, with no
uplifted hand of Webb, or Banes, or Dennis O'Kane, or Martin Tschudy, or
R. Penn Smith, or Theodore Hesser to check them; that he, Haskell, met
them, "a tide of rabbits," and ordered them to halt, to about face, and to
fire, and hearing his voice they obeyed his command, and he led them back
to glorious victory, and that he--as the one solitary horseman between the
lines, only 40 yards from the enemy--repulsed Longstreet's Corps, and
thereby, therein and thereon ended the great conflict at Gettysburg.

It was such a ridiculous page of fiction that if Haskell had survived the
vicissitudes of war, he would have eliminated it, and if he died before
the close of the Civil War--as he did--he would