It was his commanding officer, Hooker, who wrote those words a few days afterward. From the hands of his own general came that unkindest cut! Exit Milroy, thus amid hisses and laughter--the hornet’s nest at Winchester was swept away--and Ewell headed straight for Pennsylvania. Longstreet came up rapidly to fill the gap in the line--Hill followed Longstreet--and then the world beheld the singular spectacle of an army extended in a long skirmish line over a hundred miles, with another army massed not daring to assail it. Hooker did not see his “opening;” but Lincoln did. One of his dispatches has been quoted--here is another as amusing and as judicious. “If the head of Lee’s army is at Martinsburg,” Lincoln wrote Hooker, “and the tail of it on the Plank road, between Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville, _the animal must be very slim somewhere--could you not break him?_” But Hooker could not. He did not even try. Lee’s movements seemed to paralyze him--his chief of staff wrote:-- “We cannot go boggling round, until we know what we are going after.” “Boggling round” exactly described the movements of Hooker. He was still in a grand fog, and knew nothing of his adversary’s intent, when a terrific cry arose among the well-to-do farmers of Pennsylvania. The wolf had appeared in the fold. Ewell was rapidly advancing upon Harrisburg. Behind came the veteran corps of Hill and Longstreet. The gorges of the Blue Ridge were alive with bristling bayonets. Then the waters of the Potomac splashed around the waists of the infantry and the wheels of the artillery carriages. Soon the fields of Maryland and Pennsylvania were alive with “rebels,” come, doubtless, to avenge the outrages of Pope and Milroy. Throughout those commonwealths--through Philadelphia, New York, and Boston--rang the cry, “Lee is coming!” To return to the cavalry. The horsemen of Stuart were going to move in an eccentric orbit. These are my _memoirs_, reader, not a history of the war; I describe only what I saw, and am going to ask you now, to “follow the feather” of Stuart. Stuart was promptly in the saddle, and when Lee began to move, advanced north of the Rappahannock, drawing a cordon of cavalry across the roads above Middleburg, to guard the approaches to the mountain. The result was that the infantry defiled through the Blue Ridge without Hooker’s knowledge. He knew that something was going on, but there his information terminated. The troopers of Stuart kept watch over fifteen miles of front, and through this wall of sabres the Federal eye could not pierce.