Not the least trying quality in the existing condition to the minds of Union people, was the uncertainty of the result, so full to them of weal or woe. Their anxiety was lessened by emulating the confidence of the soldiers in Burnside. As for any quiet reflection upon probabilities, they had little or no opportunity to indulge in it. Even the returning hours of darkness did not bring stillness. The night of November 28th was especially disturbed. The noise from the fighting near Fort Sanders for two hours about midnight, was followed by cannonading from Longstreet, which shook the frailer houses of citizens and broke their sleep into fragments. Before 6 o’clock next morning, people looking westward from upper windows, could see the flashing of artillery on the river bluff beyond College Hill, which accompanied THE ASSAULT UPON FORT SANDERS. Its garrison consisted of Benjamin’s battery, part of Buckley’s, and portions of both the 79th New York and the 2nd Michigan volunteer infantry. The fort itself was a bastioned earthwork, built upon an irregular quadrilateral, fronting 125 yards each, on the north and south, 95 yards on the west and 85 yards on the east. The last named front was left open--to be afterwards stockaded; the southern front was about half and the northern nearly finished, and the one on the west was entirely so, except cutting the embrasures. The bastion angles were very heavy, the relief of the lightest one being 12 feet. The ditch of the fort was 12 feet wide and from 7 to 8 feet deep. On the parapet were laid bales of cotton, which a covering of wet hides prevented from ignition by the cannon. The whole command of Gen. Burnside were on the alert during the night. Especially so was Lieut. Benjamin, with his two hundred and twenty men under orders to keep strict silence. Just as the sun rose, the National flag was unfurled above the fort, and as the music of the “Star-spangled Banner” was poured forth at the same moment by the Division band, the voices of the men also went up in cheer after cheer. Then the enemy began a furious fire from batteries on the north and west, 700 and 1500 yards distant, and from the battery across the river. This cannonading lasted for twenty minutes, injuring only one man, but it met with no reply from Burnside’s batteries. Immediately a fire of musketry was opened by Longstreet, and at the same time a heavy column of troops, which he had concentrated in the night upon the ridge about 80 yards from the bastions, charged on them under cover of a fog, at a run. His order, issued after midnight, through Maj. Gen. McLaws, was as follows: HEADQUARTERS, Nov. 29, 1863.