ops. He thought of that
dusky grey-haired child of four thousand years of ignorance and
helplessness and the tragic role he had played in the history of our
people. And for the first time faced the question of the still more
tragic role he might play in the future.

"I'm fighting to free him and the millions like him," he mused. "What am
I going to do with him?"

The longer he thought the blacker and more insoluble became this
question, and yet he was going into battle to-morrow to fight his own
brother to the death on this issue. True the problem of national
existence was at stake, but this black problem of the possible
degradation of our racial stock and our national character still lay
back of it unsolved and possibly insoluble.

The red flash of a picket's gun on the shore of the river and the quick
answer from the other side brought his dreaming to a sudden stop before
the sterner fact of the swiftly approaching battle.

He snatched but a few hours sleep before his regiment was up and on the
march to the water's edge. A dense grey fog hung over the river and
obscured the town. The bridge builders swung their pontoons into the
water and soon the sound of timbers falling into place could be heard
with the splash of the anchors and the low quick commands of the
officers.

The grey sharpshooters, concealed on the other shore, began to fire
across the water through the fog. The sound was strangely magnified. The
single crack of a musket seemed as loud as a cannon.

The work went quickly. The bullets flew wide of the mark. The fog
suddenly lifted and a steady fusillade from the men hidden in the hills
of Fredericksburg began to pick off the bridge builders with cruel
accuracy. At times every man was down. New men were rushed to take their
places and they fell.

The signal was given to the artillery and a hundred and forty-seven
great guns suddenly began to sweep the doomed town. Houses crumpled like
egg-shells and fires began to blaze.

The sharpshooters fell back. The bridges were laid and the grand army of
a hundred and thirteen thousand began to pour across. The caissons, with
their huge black, rifled-barrel guns rumbling along the resounding
boards in a continuous roar like distant thunder.

On the southern shore the deep mud cut hills put every team to the test
of its strength and the utmost skill of their drivers. Hundreds of men
were in the mud at the wheels and still they would stick.

And then the p