IN Samuel Wilkeson. BORN in Buffalo, N. Y., 1817. DIED in New York, N. Y., 1889. AN HOUR AND FORTY MINUTES. [From a Letter to The New York Times, 6 July, 1863.] N the shadow cast by the tiny farm-house, sixteen by twenty, which General Meade had made his headquarters, lay wearied staff officers and tired correspondents. There was not wanting to the peacefulness of the scene the singing of a bird, which had a nest in a peach-tree within the tiny yard of the whitewashed cottage. In the midst of its warbling a shell screamed over the house, instantly followed by another, and another, and in a moment the air was full of the most complete artillery prelude to an infantry battle that was ever exhibited. Every size and form of shell known to British and to American gunnery shrieked, whirled, moaned, and whistled, and wrathfully fluttered over our ground. As many as six in a second, constantly two in a second, bursting and screaming over and around the headquarters, made a very hell of fire that amazed the oldest officers. They burst in the yard-burst next to the fence on both sides, garnished as usual with the hitched horses of aides and orderlies. The fastened animals reared and plunged with terror. Then one fell, then another,-sixteen lay dead and mangled before the fire ceased, still fastened by their halters, which gave the expression of being wickedly tied up to die painfully. These brute victims of a cruel war touched all hearts. Through the midst of the storm of screaming and exploding shells an ambulance, driven by its frenzied conductor at full speed, presented to all of us the marvellous spectacle of a horse going rapidly on three legs. A hinder one had been shot off at the hock. A shell tore up the little step at the headquarters cottage, and ripped bags of oats as with a knife. Another soon carried off one of its two pillars. Soon a spherical case burst opposite the open door,— another ripped through the low garret. The remaining pillar went almost immediately to the howl of a fixed shot that Whitworth must have made. During this fire, the horses at twenty and thirty feet distant were receiving their death, and soldiers in Federal blue were torn to pieces in the road, and died with the peculiar yells that blend the extorted cry of pain with horror and despair. Not an orderly, not an ambulance, not a straggler was to be seen upon the plain swept by this tempest of orchestral death, thirty minutes after it commenced. Were not one hundred and twenty pieces of artillery trying to cut from the field every battery we had in position to resist their purposed infantry attack, and to sweep away the slight defences behind which our infantry were waiting? Forty minutes,-fifty minutes,-counted watches that ran, Oh so languidly! Shells through the two lower rooms. A shell into the chimney, that daringly did not explode. Shells in the yard. The air thicker, and fuller, and more deafening with the howling and whirring of these infernal missiles. The chief of staff struck-Seth Williams-loved and respected through the army, separated from instant death by two inches of space vertically measured. An aide bored with a fragment of iron through the bone of the arm. And the time measured on the sluggish watches was one hour and forty minutes. END OF VOL. VII. PAGE MACDONOUGH, AUGUSTUS RODNEY..... 547 | SQUIER, EPHRAIM GEORGE.. PAGE 559 SHEDD, WILLIAM GREENOUGH THAYER. 541 WILSON, HENRY... 160 495 402 A General Index of Authors and Selections will be found in the Closing Volume. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS. The Editors and the Publishers of this work are under obligations to many Publishing Houses, without whose generous coöperation the LIBRARY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE could not be completed upon its design. Besides our general thanks to authors, editors, etc., whose copyrighted works are represented in the course of this series, special acknowledgment is here made to the following proprietors of matter used in the present volume: Messrs. D. APPLETON & Co., New York.-Dr. Coles's Dies Ira, Latin Hymns, etc.; Northend's Elihu Burritt; General Sherman's Memoirs; Schuckers's Life of Chase; Miss Anne Whitney's Poems. Messrs. A. C. ARMSTRONG & SON, New York.-Alice Cary's Clovernook; Mrs. Whitcher's Widow Bedott Papers. Messrs. BELFORD, CLARKE & Co., Chicago.-Fremont's Memoirs of my Life. Messrs. J. FLETCHER BRENNAN & Co., Cincinnati.-C. M. Clay's Memoirs, Writings, and Speeches. Dr. C. R. BROWNELL, Hartford, Conn.-H. H. Brownell's War-Lyrics. Messrs. CUPPLES & HURD, Boston.-Carter's Summer Cruise on the Coast of New England. Mr. G. W. DILLINGHAM, New York.-Kimball's St. Leger; Shaw's Josh Billings, His Works, etc. Messrs. FORDS, HOWARD & HULBERT, New York.-Beecher's Evolution and Religion; Beecher as a Humorist (edited by Miss Kirk); Beecher's Patriotic Addresses (edited by Howard); Greeley's Recollections of a Busy Life; Pond's Summer in England with Beecher. The FOWLER & WELLS COMPANY, New York.-Mrs. Stanton, in A History of Woman Suffrage. Mr. ARTHUR B. FULLER, Cambridge, Mass.-Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli. (See ROBERTS BROTHERS.) Messrs. HARPER & BROTHERS, New York.-Beecher's Sermons; Bigelow's Writings and Speeches of S. J. Tilden; Ross Browne's Yusef; Draper's History of the Intellectual Development of Europe; Draper's Thoughts on the Future Civil Policy of America; T. D. English, in Harper's Bazar; Greeley's Hints Toward Reform; Melville's Battle-Pieces; Motley's Rise of the Dutch Republic; Sargent's Cyclopædia of British and American Poetry; Wise's Captain Brand. Messrs. HENRY HOLT & Co., New York.-Hadley's Essays, Philological and Critical. |