No wonder there was anxiety in the wearied eyes of the Union leaders, as at last the little division of General Hunter deployed in the fields south of Sudley Ford and came cautiously feeling its way onward, Porter's brigade on the right of the road, Burnside's on the left, the Rhode Island battery jogging along the dirt track and watching for a chance to form forward into line. After the battery rode the grizzled old colonel of the New-Englanders, and after him trudged the long column of his silent men; and with the left wing rode Major Stark, and ever at his heels rode Snipe. How slow seemed the advance! how tedious the incessant halts and waits while somebody reconnoitred! and at last, issuing from the woods, they saw before them a long ridge running east and west between the road on which they were marching and the winding stream away off to the east, and out in the intervening open were two of Burnside's regiments in line of battle, slowly moving southward, and on the west side Porter's infantry was filing into the fields, and in regimental succession facing south and following the general move. Nearly a mile ahead, until lost behind that ridge, they could see the trees and walls and fences bordering a straight line across their front that they knew must be the turnpike they had quit a mile or so west of Centreville, and now, having left it behind them there, here they were facing it again with four regiments, at least, in battle line parallel with its general direction. Off to the right front it gently rose and was lost among groves and trees. Directly ahead it dipped into a sort of hollow where a little stream came purling out from the wooded uplands farther on. "Young's Branch, they call that," Snipe heard the major say to Captain Flint. There were a few farm-houses and enclosures down near the crossing of the pike. Then the road they had been following could be seen red and dry rising toward the south, running straight away for Manassas Junction, until it disappeared over the wooded crest another mile beyond the pike. East of this road the ground rose abruptly to a broad open plateau, skirted east, southeast, and south by a semi-circular fringe of thick woods. At the edge of the plateau, and near the bold, bluff-like slopes leading up to it, were two roomy houses of brick and stone, surrounded by fruit-trees and gardens,--one away up almost overhanging the pike, the other well down to the south, closer to the wood road they had been following from Sudley Springs,--the first the Robinson, the other the Henry house. From which of these were they signalling last night? was the question that went from lip to lip. Eleven o'clock, and though there had been some sound of musketry down toward the stone bridge, and the big thirty-pounder gun had let drive a shell or two into the woods, and there had been some popping of rifles among the skirmishers well ahead, not a uniformed force of rebels had