In Virginia, early in July, General George B. McClellan, then in his thirty-sixth year, and General Rosecrans, in his forty-second, collecting the cream of their little armies, skimmed the Confederate pans at Rich Mountain, while immediately after, the Confederate pails were completely upset or seized by General Morris, assisted by some help from Ohio and Indiana, at Carrick’s Ford. General Rosecrans, flowing towards the Southwest, came down like a mountain torrent in the Kanawha valley, even flooding such water-logged estrays as Henry A. Wise and the indicted Floyd. The salt springs of the valley, towards which they sped, could not preserve them from becoming spoiled, and held ever afterward, even by their friends, in bad odor. A few days afterwards, the troops near Washington, numbering about 35,000 under General McDowell, were moved in a body towards the curtain,—which was drawn back and back by its supporters to Manassas Junction,—where Beauregard, intrenched with 27,000 men, assisted by General Joseph E. Johnston and 16,000 more close at hand in Winchester, steadied and upheld it. As the 35,000 thousand went forward, the three months’ men, whose time had expired, went backward, seeking the far rear to the sound of the enemy’s cannon, until the Federal inspecting force was reduced to 18,000. As they approached that historic little rill, Bull Run, they met the combined forces of the Confederates, and after holding the field against them and even advancing upon it, until late in the afternoon, they fell into one of those panics, not unfrequent among troops, raw or seasoned, in which the wild run of frightened bulls or the disordered summersaulting and tumbles of a herd of buffaloes is an orderly march. A mass of huddling soldiers, civilians, teamsters, members of Congress, and other muddled material was thrown upon Washington. The puzzled Confederates, unconscious of victory and of course unpursuing, at length got back to their capital. Discovering at last their stupendous victory, they made up for lost time by shouts so loud that every European echo repeated it, like a very Lurlei. In this big scare were many of the leading generals on either side,—among those on the Federal, Sherman, Burnside, and Heintzelman; and on the Confederate, Longstreet, Ewell, Early, Bonham, and that praying soldier, Stonewall Jackson, then thirty-five years old, and whose saintly, fanatical bravery recalls the gallant slaughterers in the civil wars of Scotland, who tempered their prayers with bayonet-pushing amens, and ended their fervid hacking of enemies with hearty thanksgivings to Heaven. The losses on either side in men were nearly balanced,—the Federal dead amounting to 481, and the Confederate to 378; the Federal wounded to 1011, the Confederate to 1489; but in prestige, self-respect, and that subtle moral force which cannot be weighed even by grains or scruples, the advantage was greatly with the insurrectionists.