If the boyishness in Jeb Stuart, his dear love of dancing meteors, had swept him in the past weeks too far from his proper base, he was now fully and to the end by his general’s side. He kept his gaiety, his _panache_, but he put on the full man. He was the Stuart of Chancellorsville, throwing a steady dart, swinging a great shield. Longstreet, the “old war horse”; A.P. Hill, red-shirted, a noble fighter; “Dear Dick Ewell”—each rose, elastic, from the disastrous field and played the man. That slow retreat from Gettysburg to the Potomac, through a hostile country, with a victorious, larger army hovering, willing to strike if only it could find the unguarded place, was masterly planned, masterly done. The Army of Northern Virginia retired grudgingly, with backward turnings, foot planted and spear brandished. It had with it pain and agony, for it carried its wounded; it had with it appalling knowledge that Vicksburg was fallen, that the battle behind them, hard-fought for three days, was lost, that the campaign was lost, that across the river the South was mourning, mourning, that at last all were at the death-grapple. It knew it all, but it went steadily, with lips that could yet manage a smile. For all its freight of wounded, for all the mourning of its banners, it went ably; a long, masterly retreat, with effective stands and threatenings. But how the wounded suffered, only the wounded knew. The rain came down as it usually did after the prolonged cannonadings of these great battles. It came down in sullen torrents, unfriendly, cold, deepening the deep reaction after the fever of the fight. It fell in showers from a sky leaden all the day, inky all the night. At twilight on the fourth, A.P. Hill and the Third Corps swung in silence out upon the Fountain Dale and Monterey road. They marched away in the rain and darkness. All night Longstreet and the First stayed in position at the Peach Orchard. But the foe did not attack, and at dawn Longstreet and the First followed A.P. Hill. When the dawn broke, grey and wet, Ewell and the Second Corps alone were there by Seminary Ridge. Again the blue—they also gathering their wounded, they also mourning their dead—made no movement to attack. Ewell and the Second followed the First. The rain came down, the rain came down—rain and wind and low-hanging clouds. Forty thousand men marched in a silence which, now and then, it was felt, must be broken. Men broke it, with song that had somehow a sob in it, with laughter more strained than jovial. Then came down the silence again, leaden with the leaden rain. But march in silence, or march in mirth, the Army of Northern Virginia marched with its _morale_ unbroken. _Tramp, tramp!_ through the shifting sheets of rain, through the wind that bent the tree-tops.... With Hood’s division marched four thousand and more of Federal prisoners. With these, too, the silence was heavy.