1863 came, and it was an army of veterans that struck Hooker at Chancellorsville. It was no longer a company of gay gallants marching by, amid music, waving scarfs, and showers of nosegays from fairy hands. It was a stormy wave of gaunt warriors, in ragged clothes and begrimed faces, who clutched their shining muskets, rushed headlong over the breastworks, and, rolling through the blazing and crackling woods, swept the enemy at the point of the bayonet, with the hoarse and menacing cry, “Remember Jackson!” Gettysburg followed--never was grapple more fierce than that, as we have seen; and when the veterans of Lee were hurled back, the soil of the continent seemed to shake. They were repulsed and retreated, but as the lion retreats before the huntsman, glaring back, and admonishing him not to follow too closely, if he would consult his own safety. At Williamsport the wounded lion halted and turned--his pursuer did not assail him--and he crossed the Potomac, and descended to the Rapidan, to strike in turn that dangerous blow in October, when Meade was nearly cut off from Washington. With that campaign of Bristoe, and the fiasco of Mine Run, the year of 1863 ended. It left the South bleeding, and what was worse,--discouraged. Affairs were mismanaged. The army had scarcely sufficient meat and bread to live on. The croakers, clad in black coats, and with snowy shirt bosoms, began to mutter under their breath, “It is useless to struggle longer!”--and, recoiling in disgust from the hard fare of “war times,” began to hunger for the flesh-pots of Egypt. Manna was tasteless now; the task-master was better than the wilderness and the scant fare. Oh! to sit by the flesh-pots and grow fat, as in the days when they did eat thereof! Why continue the conflict? Why waste valuable lives? Why think of still fighting when flour was a hundred dollars a barrel, coffee twenty dollars a pound, cloth fifty dollars a yard, and good whiskey and brandy not to be purchased at any price? Could patriotism live amid trials like that? Could men cling to a cause which made them the victims of Yankee cavalry? Why have faith any longer in a government that was bankrupt--whose promises to pay originated the scoffing proverb, “as worthless as a Confederate note!” Meat and drink was the religion of the croakers in those days. Money was their real divinity. Without meat and drink, and with worthless money, the Confederacy, in their eyes, was not the side to adhere to. It was unfortunate--down with it! Let it be anathema-maranatha!