r side of the river.

"Gentlemen," said General Jackson, "the enemy has begun the passage.
Those are our guns giving the signal to the army."

Harry's pulses began to throb. But, although fires flared up here and
there, little was to be seen in the darkness. Fortune seemed to have
shifted suddenly to the side of the Union. Not night alone protected
the bridge builders, but a thick, impenetrable fog, rising from the
river and the muddy earth, covered the stream and its shores. The
Southerners could not see just where the bridge head was and their
cannon must fire at random through the heavy darkness. Sixteen hundred
Mississippians were stationed in Fredericksburg below, well concealed
in cellars and rifle pits, but they could not see either, and for the
present their rifles were silent.

But Harry's imagination immediately became intensely vivid again.
He fancied that he could hear through all the shifting gloom the sound
of axes and hammers and saws at work upon that bridge. These army
engineers could throw a bridge across a river in half a day. He
recognized at all times the great resources and the mechanical genius of
the North. The South had good bridge builders herself, but she had bent
all her powers to the development of public men and soldiers. Harry
felt more intensely all the time the one-sided character of her growth
and its defects.

Dalton stood by Harry's side, and the darkness was so intense that he
seemed but a shadow. A little further away was Jackson. No fires had
been lighted in his camp, but nevertheless he was not a shadow. That
personality, quiet and modest, was so intense, so powerful that it
seemed to Harry to become luminous, to radiate light in the blackness
of the night. It was imagination, he knew, at work again, but it was
Jackson who had loosed its springs.

"Can you see your watch, George?" he whispered to Dalton.

"Yes, and its says only twenty minutes past three in the morning."

"And our signal guns began about twenty minutes ago. They will have
nearly four hours in which to work before the sun rises and we can see
them well enough to take good aim."

"And maybe longer than that, Harry. The whole night is permeated with
the heaviest inland fog I ever knew. Maybe it will take the sun a long
time to strike through it or drive it away. It's bad for us."

"But we'll win anyhow. I tell you, we'll win anyhow! Do you hear me,
George?"

"Yes, Harry, I hear you. Yo