Upon the third and last day, July 3d, General Meade opened the combat early in the morning by driving out Ewell's forces, who had effected a lodgement on Culp's Hill. General Lee did not learn of this, but he was full of the idea that both the Union centre and right wing had been weakened the previous day, and during the night he planned an attack in front, to be accompanied by a cavalry movement around the Union right to assail the rear, thus following up Ewell's supposed advantage. To give Stuart with the cavalry time to get around to the rear, the front attack was not made until afternoon. During the morning each side got cannon into position, Lee having one hundred and twenty guns along Seminary Ridge, and Meade eighty in the Cemetery and southward, along a low, irregular stone pile, forming a sort of rude wall bordering the road leading from Gettysburg south to Taneytown, in Maryland. The action began about one o'clock in the afternoon, when the Confederates opened fire, and the most terrific artillery duel of the war took place across the intervening valley, six guns being discharged every second. The troops suffered little, as they kept down in the ground, but several Union guns were dismounted. After two hours deafening cannonade Lee ordered his grand attack, the celebrated charge by General Pickett, a force of fourteen thousand men with brigade front advancing across the valley. They marched swiftly, and had a mile to go, but before they were half-way across all the available Union guns had been trained upon them. Their attack was directed at an umbrella-shaped clump of trees on the Cemetery Ridge at a low place where the rude stone wall made an angle, with its point outside. General Hancock commanded this portion of the Union line. The grape and canister of the Union cannonade ploughed furrows through Pickett's ranks, and when his column got within three hundred yards, Hancock opened musketry fire with terrible effect. Thousands fell, and the brigades broke in disorder; but the advance, headed by General Armistead on foot, continued, and about one hundred and fifty men leaped over the stone piles at the angle to capture the Union guns. Lieutenant Cushing, mortally wounded in both thighs, ran his last serviceable gun towards the wall, and shouting to his commander, "Webb, I will give them one more shot!" he fired the gun and died. Armistead put his hand on the cannon, waved his sword, and called out, "Give them the cold steel, boys!" then, pierced by bullets, he fell dead alongside of Cushing. Both lay near the clump of trees, about thirty yards inside the wall, their corpses marking the farthest point to which Pickett's advance penetrated. There was a hand to hand conflict; Webb was wounded, and also Hancock, and the slaughter was dreadful. The Confederates were overwhelmed, and not one-fourth of the gallant charging column, composed of the flower of the Virginia troops, escaped, the remnant retreating in disorder. Stuart's cavalry