How he managed to preserve his strength and enthusiasm, and to excel where so many others did well and nobly, is an open secret. In the first place, he was a man of profoundest religious faith in the Heavenly Father. Prayer was his refreshment. He renewed his strength by waiting upon God. His spirit never grew weary. In the darkest days he was able to cheer and encourage the desponding. He spoke continually, through the _Journal_, to hundreds of thousands of readers, in tones of cheer. Like a great lighthouse, with its mighty lamps ever burning and its reflectors and lenses kept clean and clear, Carleton, never discouraged, terrified, or tired out, sent across the troubled sea and through the deepest darkness the inspiriting flash of the light of truth and the steady beam of faith in the Right and its ultimate triumph. He was a missionary of cheer among the soldiers in camp and at the front. His reports of battles, and his message of comfort in times of inaction, wilted the hopes of the traitors, copperheads, cowards, and "nightshades" at home, while they put new blood in the veins of the hopeful. Carleton was always welcome among the commanders and at headquarters. This was because of his frankness as well as his ability and his genial bonhomie and social qualities. He did not consider himself a critic of generals. He simply described. He took care to tell what he saw, or knew on good authority to be true. He did probe rumors. From the very first he became a higher critic of assertions and even of documents. He quickly learned the value of camp reports and items of news. By and by his skill became the envy of many of less experienced readers of human nature, and judges of talk and despatches. While shirking no hard work in the saddle, on foot, on the rail, or in the boat, he found by experience that by keeping near headquarters he was the better enabled to know the motions of the army as a whole, to divine the plans of the commanding general, and thus test the value of flying rumors. He had a genius for interpreting signs of movement, whether in the loading of a barge, the riding of an orderly, or the nod of a general's head. His previous training as an engineer and surveyor enabled him to foresee the strategic value of a position and to know the general course of a campaign in a particular district of country. With this power of practical foresight, he was often better able even than some of the generals to foresee and appraise results. This topographical knowledge also gave him that power of wonderful clearness in description which is the first and best quality necessary to the narrator of a series of complex movements. A battle fought in the open, like that at Gettysburg, or one of those which took place during the previous campaigns, on a plain, along the river, and in the Peninsula, is comparatively easy to describe, especially when viewed from an eminence. These battles were like those in ordinary European