a towering reputation, nor indeed did the last lack bards to
sing of him. Whatever tarn cap the one had worn during the past three
days, however bewildering had been his inaction, his reputation held.
This was Jackson.... There must have been some good reason ... this was
Stonewall Jackson. Magruder's brigades cheered him vehemently, and he
looked at them unsmiling, with a mere motion of his hand toward the
rusty old cadet cap. Magruder, magnificently soldierly, with much of
manner and rich colour, magnanimously forgetful this morning of "other
important duties" and affably debonair though his eyelids dropped for
want of sleep, came gradually to halt in his fluent speech.--"Weally,
you can't talk forever to a potht! If thilenthe be golden he ith the
heavietht weight of hith time."--Jackson gathered up his reins, nodded
and rode off, the troops cheering as he went by.

Stafford, coming up with him, saluted and gave his message. Jackson
received it with impassivity and rode on. Conceiving it to be his duty
to attend an answer, the staff officer accompanied him, though a little
in the rear. Here were an aide and a courier, and the three rode
silently behind their silent chief. At the Williamsburg road there came
a halt. Jackson checked Little Sorrel, and sat looking toward Richmond.
Down the road, in the sunrise light, came at a canter a knot of horsemen
handsomely mounted and equipped, the one in front tall and riding an
iron-grey. Stafford recognized the commander-in-chief. Jackson sat very
still, beneath a honey locust. The night before, in a wood hard by, the
17th Mississippi had run into a Federal brigade. The latter had fired,
at point blank, a withering volley. Many a tall Mississippian had
fallen. Now in the early light their fellow soldiers had gone seeking
them in the wood, drawn them forth, and laid them in a row in the wet
sedge beside the road. Nearly every man had been shot through the brain.
They lay ghastly, open-eyed, wet with rain, staring at the cool and pure
concave of the sky. Two or three soldiers were moving slowly up and down
the line, bent on identifications. Presumably Jackson was aware of that
company of the dead, but their presence could not be said to disturb
him. He sat with his large hands folded over the saddle-bow, with the
forage cap cutting all but one blue-grey gleam of his eyes, still as
stone wall or mountain or the dead across the way. As the horsemen came
nearer his lips parted. "Tha