le towards
his weaker brethren. It is too sadly true that many of the military
officers, who yielded to the temptation of temporarily bracing their
nerves at critical moments, became slaves to the bottle, and
afterwards confirmed drunkards. Carleton made no use of tobacco in any
form.

Carleton's wonderful prescience of coming events, and his decisions
rightly made as to his own whereabouts in crises, enabled him to
concentrate without wasting his powers. He then gave himself to his
work with all ardor, and without sparing brain or muscle, risking limb
and life at Bull Run, on the Mississippi, at Fort Donelson, at
Antietam and Gettysburg, in the Wilderness, at Savannah, and in
Richmond. His powers in toil were prodigious. He could turn off an
immense amount of work, and keep it up. When the lull followed the
agony, he went home to rest and recruit, spending the time with his
wife and friends, everywhere diffusing the sunshine of hope and
faith. When rested and refreshed, he hied again to the front and the
conflict. The careers of most army correspondents in the field were
short. Carleton's race was long. His was the promise of the prophet's
glorious burden in Isaiah xl. 28-31.

It was between his thirty-eighth and forty-second year, when in the
high tide of his manly strength, that Carleton pursued the profession
of letters amid the din of arms. His pictures show him a handsome man,
with broad, open forehead and sunny complexion, standing nearly six
feet high, his feet cased in the broad and comfortable boots which he
always wore. Over his ordinary suit of clothing was a long and
comfortable overcoat with a cape, around which was a belt, to which
hung a spy-glass. Later in the war he bought a fine binocular marine
glass. He gave the old "historic spy-glass" to his nephew Edmund, from
under whose head it was stolen by some camp thief. In his numerous and
capacious pockets, besides a watch and a pocket compass, was a store
of note-books, in which he was accustomed to jot his rapid,
lightning-like notes, which meant "reading without tears" for him, but
woe and sorrow to those who had to knit their brows in trying to
decipher his "crow-tracks." During the first part of the war he bought
horses as often as he needed them, and these were not always of the
first quality as to flesh or character. He usually found it difficult
to recover his beast after having been away home. In the later
campaigns he possessed finer animals