The news of Vicksburg was soon to come, another crowning glory for the Fourth, though not known for days after, and Grant was to be a third time canonized. But just then there was enough without Vicksburg, and the nation might have gone mad over the double tidings had they come at once. Who, that has one drop of patriotic blood surging in his heart, can ever forget the reading of those "victory extras" that flew wide over the land on Saturday night and Sunday morning--the quavering voices of the readers, the reddening cheeks and flashing eyes of the hearers? Never before did so much seem to have been won, because never before did so much seem to have been perilled. And Philadelphia, that had sunken lowest in despondency of any of the great cities, naturally rose highest when the word of victory came. Bells rung, flags waved, music sounded, gas blazed like the noonday, processions paraded, business revived as if Trade had a human form and a crushing weight had suddenly been lifted from its breast, and old Independence Hall once more boomed its bell and flashed over the city its midnight eye of fire, as if its defiance to tyranny and treason had never faltered for a moment. It was of Gettysburgh that Kitty Hood had been reading, at her little cottage home near the great road, after her return from church on Sunday the fifth of July, when she dashed away the tears of agitation and anxiety that had been gathering in her eyes, and said: "Dick Compton was right, after all, and I was a fool to try to keep him away! If he had obeyed me, I should have despised him now; and if he has not been killed in that terrible battle and lives to come home again, I will tell him how wrong I was, and what a ninny I made of myself, and how sorry I am for every word I spoke that day, and how much better I love him because he obeyed the call of his country instead of the poor, weak, miserable voice of a frightened woman!" And it was of Gettysburgh and the desperate fighting around Cemetery Hill that Robert Brand had been reading, on the same Sunday afternoon, sitting in the shade of his own piazza, when he hurled out these bitter words, which poor little Elsie heard as she lay upon the lounge in the parlor within: "This is what he has lost, the low-lived, contemptible poltroon! _My son_, and to shirk a great battle! He might have been dead now, and in a grave better than any house in which he can ever hide his miserable life; or he might have had something to remember and boast of all his days--that he was one of the Men of Gettysburgh! If I had two legs, I would go out and find him yet and shoot him with my own hand--the infernal cowardly cur!" And then the disgraced and irate father tried to forget his son and to bury himself in other details of the great battle.