carried Sheridan to the field of Cedar Creek, twenty miles away; and he was on him at Five Forks, the battle which broke Lee's line and let disaster in. Before the final charge there, the horse became as impatient as his rider, kicking, plunging, tossing his head, pulling at the bit, while foam flecked his black breast. And when Sheridan gave him his head, when he saw that Ayres, at the point of the bayonet, was going to carry the day, off sprang Rienzi and with a leap bounded over the enemy's works and landed Sheridan among the mob of prisoners and fighting troops. Well, Rienzi, by this time to-morrow you will bear your distinguished rider to the McLean house, and there you will see General Lee coming up on Traveller, a horse with a better temper than yours, and soon thereafter Grant will ride up on high-bred Cincinnati, and you three horses will go down to history together; and Grant to the day of his death will say that your rider, little Phil Sheridan, was the one great corps commander of the war.

As you see, Sheridan is cased in the uniform of his grade; he has on a double-breasted frock-coat, the brass buttons in groups of three; his trousers are outside of his boots and strapped down; and slightly tipping on his big round head is a low-crowned, soft felt hat, concealing his close-cropped black hair. He is the very embodiment of vital energy, and in addition to his natural force and courage he is supported by an extraordinary, clear and quick comprehension of the phases of battle. Were you to get close to him, you would not fail to note his set jaw, his rather high, solid cheek-bones, quick blazing eyes, and all the impulsive characteristics of his determined nature mingling in his weather-bronzed face; and perchance it would make you think of a living anvil. His voice is naturally low, and on one occasion,

amid all the tension and din of battle, an aide came galloping up and began to scream out some bad news, whereupon Sheridan, with set teeth and low measured tones, said, 'Damn you, sir, don't yell at me!' Great as will his honors be, he never will have any affectations, but will ring true to the end.

Those threescore or more unfurled Confederate colors carried behind him and his brilliant staff, "Tony' and 'Sandy' Forsythe, Newhall, and Gillespie, were captured at Sailor's Creek; and could anything equal the sight of those flags in stirring the hearts of his men to renewed daring?

And now the rear of the cavalry is passing, the head of the column has long since disappeared over the crest. Sheridan is near the top of the hill and I can still make out his blue headquarters flag. It was with that flag in his hand, Rienzi plunging wildly and mad with the excitement of the roaring musketry, that Sheridan, aflame, turned Ayres's repulsed division back to face their foes again at Five Forks, and then to carry Pickett's line of breast works. In the oncoming infantry that will soon appear you will see Ayres and that very division; and I have no doubt that you will look on them with admiration when I tell you of their exploits, for I have been with them and seen them under fire.

And now, in the momentary pause between cavalry and infantry, goes by a little squad with bandaged heads and limbs, hurrying along, some on mules and some on horses. They are wounded cavalrymen who have slipped away from the field hospitals of Sailor's Creek and Farmville, and are bound to be with their regiments.

'What has that hatless man with the bandage across his brow dismounted for, there at the run?' Watch him and you will see. He is filling the canteens of his comrades. And note how the

feverish fellows drink! He has had to fill one a second time; the contents of the first have been poured over a bandaged arm. Oh, fine is the spirit in the Army of the Potomac to-day!

'But why are you smiling?' Oh, because I know those fellows well, and except that obviously broken-down, abandoned old mule, and that woe-begone, bald-faced chestnut horse which they have picked up, the chances are ten to one that those young rascals have stolen every mount they have.

Now they are off, and the infantry is just issuing from the woods, and Turner's division of Ord's command is in the lead. Those troops, some from Illinois, some from Ohio, West Virginia, and far-away Massachusetts, were in the lines north of the James when the campaign began, and have covered more miles than any in the army. Note their swing as they pass by, for they mean to keep up with the cavalry.

Behind them is Foster's division, and at its head are two small brigades of colored troops, as you see. Do you know, my friend, that these earnest black men recall some vivid memories? For I sat on the parapet of one of our batteries and saw Feraro's division - they were all negroes officered by white men move to the attack when the mine was exploded at Petersburg. Up to that day thousands of us doubted the colored man's courage, and for fear these negroes would falter, a division of white troops was assigned to lead the assault. But such heroism as they displayed I never saw surpassed on any field. Their advance up the incline was in full view, and you should have seen their steadiness in the face of a most deadly front-and-flank fire. Their flags began to fall as soon as they cleared our works, but up they would come boldly and on they would go. I cannot tell you how my breath shortened as the ground was strewn with

their dead and wounded. Let us uncover. They have shown that they can be loyal and true to their masters, and they have shown that they can stand undaunted the final test of battle. Full of pathos are their songs and their fate for me, and I sometimes wonder if marble and bronze are not waiting for the hand of genius to express nature's deep feeling of North and South in their behalf.

That spare man with iron gray hair and moustache is Ord, the senior officer of all this column of cavalry and infantry hastening on to head off Lee. He graduated at West Point the year Grant entered, and his eyes are bluishgray and kindly. In company he is an easy but not a loquacious talker, and never is known to be angry or excited; in other words, Reader, he is a man of good breeding. His voice, which is naturally clear, has a tinge of persuasiveness or solicitation in its tones. It was he who tried to bring about an interview between Grant and Lee before this final campaign began, for he felt sure that if they could meet they would bring the war to an end. Longstreet joined with him in this merciful and patriotic design, but as soon as it was heard of in Washington, Grant got peremptory orders to have no communication with Lee on questions of a political nature.

All in all, I am glad that Ord's scheme failed, but, nevertheless, it tells what kind of man he is, and Peace at the last great day will beckon to him, you may rest assured, to come and sit down by her side.

That young man, in fact almost a boy, among his staff, is Alfred A. Woodhull, an assistant surgeon in the army; and when Ord went to see Longstreet on his peace mission, he took Woodhull with him.

And now there is another pause, for some of Ord's wagons are stalled at the

run and block the way, but the officers and drivers are using the vigorous terms which the mule understands, and soon the road will be cleared. Yes, even now, for look, look! there comes the old Fifth Corps. See how the sun glints on the leaning gun-barrels! Griffin is at its head, and behind him floats the Maltese Cross What fields the sight of that flag evokes! Gaines's Mill, Glendale, Malvern Hill, Manassas, Fredericksburg, Gettysburg, the Wilderness, Spottsylvania, Cold Harbor, Five Forks! Blood of the Fifth Corps reddened, and in some cases almost deluged, every one of them. And, upon my soul, I hear the volleys again, and once more I see their colors crossing the Old Sanders Field in the Wilderness and wavering up toward the orchard on the Spindle farm at Spottsylvania! Come on, you that are left! Come on! I was young once, too, and shared those bitter days with you. God bless you, come on with those tattered banners!

Leading the First Brigade is Chamberlain of Maine, and for the sake of Round Top, the key of Gettysburg, which at the sword's tip he helped to save, and for the sake of his gentleness and knightliness, for he will bring that division to a salute when the Army of Northern Virginia marches by to lay down their arms, wave your laurel for Chamberlain.

There go Coulter, Bartlett, and Baxter; they do not know me, but I know them; and when I saw Bartlett last in the Wilderness, blood was streaming down his face. And here comes Crawford, neat and trim as usual; and behind him is Kellogg leading all that is left of the Iron Brigade of the West, the Sixth and Seventh Wisconsin; for the sake of that first day at Gettysburg let us rise and uncover.

And here comes the sturdy old reg

ular, Ayres, with his division fresh from Five Forks. Look at those shredded and bullet-riddled colors! In their lacerated bands of red and white, and in those ripped, star-decked fields of blue, is written the visible history of the Army of the Potomac. Oh, let us be grateful for that breeze which has set them a-rippling. They seem to be rejoicing. And who has told the west wind that peace is coming?

There go the One Hundred and Fortieth, One Hundred and Fortysixth New York, the One Hundred and Fifty-fifth Pennsylvania, and the Maryland Brigade. All hail! but oh, brave fellows, are you all that are left? Reader, if you should ever visit the field of Spottsylvania I wish you would go to where a stone bears this legend:

FARTHEST ADVANCE ON THIS FRONT

THE MARYLAND BRIGADE 'Never mind bullets, never mind cannon, but press on and clear the road.'

That was the order they got from Warren that Sunday morning and I saw them try to obey it. Can I easily find it? Yes; and it will be glad to see you, and as you stand beside it in its loneliness and recall what it commemorates, you will feel how gently persuasive is the peace of the arching sky.

And now that they have all gone by and are mounting the hill, I feel sorry that I directed your eye to a few only of those brave officers and men. But perhaps I have delayed the narrative already too long. Would that I could keep right on with the story, and that I did not so often forget that the majority of my fellow men have no particular interest in the mysteriously suffusing lights which haunt the background of heroic deeds, but are concerned rather in the deeds themselves.

My friend and I were watching the graceful undulations of a Blériot monoplane as it lazily circled the aviation field after the mad swoops and spiral climbings which had caught our breath with fear and wonder. Ah,' said my friend, with a touch of reverence in his voice, 'the age of miracles is n't over.'

He is no mystic, this friend of mine; the grotto of Lourdes and the Christian Science temple interest him, if at all, only as curious instances of abnormal psychology; but his soul craved a miracle, it seems, and he found it at the aviation meet. A moment later he added, 'In a few years we shall all be flying, I suppose.' Although I knew, of course, that his words had no reference to the strong angelic pinions of a beatific hereafter, his second platitude led me to reflect that the age of faith' might not be over either; and when at breakfast next morning I read of one more aviator whose name had been added to the long death-roll, I caught myself muttering something about the 'age of martyrs.'

We are very fond of these vague phrases the age of this and the age of that. It is so convenient to dispose of a whole century, or a group of centuries, by affixing a neat descriptive label and filing it away methodically in the card-catalogue of one's historical memory. The label seems somehow to clothe the nakedness of our essential ignorance; we feel that we have not only identified but have understood. We denominate certain prehistoric centuries the 'Stone Age,' and

instantly the mists of our all but total ignorance seem to lighten. I suspect that Adam gave names to all the beasts of the field mainly that he might dispel the unfamiliar strangeness of them. Particularly convenient is it when the label has a certain philosophical tinge to it, so that we may seem to have caught and fixed the very soul and guiding principle of an 'Age of Reason,' or an 'Age of Faith.'

The Middle Ages, but little understood and vaguely realized, have been most frequently and continuously disposed of by this process of the descriptive label. Not many years ago the approved label read, "The Dark Ages.' The kindly poet Cowper could refer to the 'tedious years of Gothic darkness,' and Shelley could speak of 'enormities which gleam like comets through the darkness of Gothic and superstitious ages.' Barbarism, violence, ignorance, and gross superstition - these ideas all lurk within the shadows of the word 'dark.' One had but to affix the label, and the heart of many centuries was presented on a charger. But this modern blackening of the mediaval kettle has gone out of fashion. The term 'dark ages' is now confined, by thoughtful people at least, to the two or three centuries immediately after the fall of the Roman Empire; the Middle Ages proper we now sentimentalize as an 'age of chivalry' or an 'age of faith.'

The Age of Faith, of child-like trust in the evidence of things not seen, of superstition, if you will; but how touch

ing in its naïve simplicity! With a strain of patronizing condescension, no doubt, but none the less with genuine weariness of heart, we turn back to the blessed days when the sea of faith was at the full, and listen with sadness to its 'melancholy, long, withdrawing roar.'

But is faith withdrawing or withdrawn? Is not faith, nay, even credulity, too intimately woven into the texture of the human heart ever to be unraveled and cast aside? Mankind does not abandon faith, but merely transfers it through the ages from one set of objects to another. The Middle Age was doubtless an 'age of faith'; so is our own age; so have been all the ages about which we have any knowledge. The eighteenth century, labeled by Carlyle the 'skeptical century,' and by its admirers the age of reason,' exhibits the most child-like trust in the efficacy and saving grace of Reason, Humanity, Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality, and a whole pantheon of splendid abstractions visible only to the eye of faith, which were to save and remake the world. The French Revolution, with its militant gospel of liberty, with its proclamation of a new heaven and a new earth, wherein does it differ, save in externals, from the passionately preached crusades of old? Rousseau is its Peter the Hermit, Mirabeau its Godfrey. Like the Crusades it sought through violence and cruelty to realize its burning faith.

To-day the faith of man has turned to the discoveries and achievements of science. I, for example, am not more credulous than my neighbors; but I believe firmly that, contrary to the evidence of my senses, the sun's rising and setting are due, not to the motion of the sun, but to the spinning of this so solid-seeming earth. I have no proof save the assertion of the astronomers it is a believing where I

cannot prove. By a similar act of faith I let my imagination expatiate in the infinite regions of interstellar space and gaze reverently at the ray of starlight which was kindled at its source a hundred years ago. Quia impossibile, ergo credo.

My friend the geologist speaks casually of the Eocene and of the Carboniferous Era; in his talk a thousand years are but as yesterday. I think somewhat wistfully of the tidy little six-days' creation of my fathers; but my faith triumphs and I trust the geologist, even when he tells me of floods which make those of Deucalion and old Noah seem but poor affairs at best. He tells me of vast ice-fields covering half a continent, and by way of proof shows me on an afternoon's walk sundry scratches in the rocks. I gaze reverently upon the scratches and assent. To these marvels and to many like them I have no choice but to assent. To reject them would be heresy to the faith of the age, and punishable as heresy. Were I, for example, to exercise my 'right of private judgment' by asserting openly that the sun and stars revolve about the earth, I should find my friends estranged, my opinions on all other subjects discredited, and my position in the university speedily

vacant.

The central dogma of the new religion is the doctrine of evolution. The modern man accepts it as a matter of course, though probably not one in a hundred of those who accept can give a satisfactory statement of it, much less appraise the evidence on which it rests. Believers of the baser sort suppose that it asserts their descent from monkeys, and rather glory, it would seem, in the lineage. Those of finer nature suppose that it assures us of ultimate attainment to a more than angelic perfection. I am credibly informed that neither of these suppos