formed such a brilliant episode of that badly-managed battle, and his abilities shone so prominently in contrast with the delinquencies of others, that he was at once made a major general. In the dark cedars at Stone River he kept his men together, when almost surrounded or entirely cut off, only by being at all times along the front line of battle with them; by well-directed encouragement to the deserving, and the blackest reproaches to the delinquents; by alternate appeals and curses, and a constant display of a daring which was inspiring, and in the presence of which no man dared betray himself a coward. "The history of the combat of those dark cedars will never be known," wrote the only historian who has as yet truly written of Stone River, Mr. W. S. Furay, of the Cincinnati Gazette, a young man of very extraordinary abilities, and the most conscientious of all the war correspondents whom I met in the army. "No man," he adds, "could see even the whole of his own regiment, and no one will ever be able to tell who they were that fought bravest, or they who proved recreant to their trust. It was left to Sheridan to stay the successful onset of the foe. Never did a man labor more faithfully than he to perform his task, and never was leader seconded by more gallant soldiers. His division formed a kind of pivot, upon which the broken right wing turned in its flight, and its perilous condition can easily be imagined when the flight of Davis's division left it without any protection from the triumphant enemy who now swarmed upon its front and right flank; but it fought until one fourth of its number lay bleeding and lying upon the field, and till both remaining brigade commanders, Colonel Roberts and Shaeffer, had met with the same fate as General Sill." When Sheridan had extricated his command from the forest and got in line with the reserves, he rode up to Rosecrans, and, pointing to the remnant of his division, said, "Here is all that is left of us, general. Our cartridge-boxes contain nothing, and our guns are empty."