among
the pines, moving lights of burying parties, which are tumbling the
slain into the trenches. A cowed and shivering silence has succeeded the
late burst of drums, trumpets, and cannon; the dead are at rest; the
captives are quiet; the good cause has won again, and I shall try to
tell you how.

Many months ago the Army of the Potomac stopped before Petersburg,
driven out of its direct course to Richmond. It tried the Dutch Gap and
the powder-ship, and shelled and shovelled till Sherman had cut five
States in half, and only timid financiers, sutlers, and congressional
excursionists paid the least attention to the armies on the James. We
had fights without much purpose at our breastworks, and at Hatcher's
Run, but the dashing achievements of Sheridan in the Shenandoah Valley
overtopped all our dull infantry endeavors, and he shared with Sherman
the entire applause of the country. No one knows but that behind these
actors stood the invisible prompter, Grant; yet prompters, however
assiduous, never divide applauses with the _dramatis personae_; and
therefore, when Sheridan, the other day, by one of those slashing
adventures which hold us breathless, appeared on the Pamunkey and
crossed the peninsula to City Point, even the armies of the Potomac and
James were agitated. The _personnel_ of the man, not less than his
renown, affected people. A very Punch of soldiers, a sort of Rip Van
Winkle in regimentals, it astonished folks, that with so jolly and
grotesque a guise, he held within him energies like lightning, the bolts
of which had splintered the fairest parts of the border. But nobody
credited General Sheridan with higher genius than activity; we expected
to hear of him scouring the Carolina boundary, with the usual
destruction of railways and mills, and therefore said at once that
Sheridan would cut the great Southside road. But in this last chapter
Sheridan must take rank as one of the finest military men of our
century. The battle of "Five Forks" was, perhaps, the most ingeniously
conceived and skilfully executed that we have ever had on this
continent. It matches in secretiveness and shrewdness the cleverest
efforts of Napoleon, and shows also much of that soldier's broadness of
intellect and capacity for great occasions.

Sheridan had scarcely time to change his horses' shoes before he was
off, and after him much of our infantry also moved to the left. We
passed our ancient breastworks at Hatcher's Run, and ext