Silence and smoke hung over Gettysburg.
Presently out of the smoke on the Confederate side came three lines of gray a mile long. Battle-flags nodded at intervals, and swords blazed in the sun.
Very deliberately and with pains about aiming, the Union batteries began to hurl solid shot against the gray advance. Soon holes were bitten here and there, and occasionally a flag went down, to be instantly snatched up and waved defiantly. When Pickett, Pettigrew, and the splendid brigade of Cadmus Wilcox had reached the bottom of the valley, their organization was as unbroken as a parade. But there shell, instead of round shot, met them, and men tasted death by fives and tens. But the lines, drawing together, closed the spaces left by mortality, and the flags began to approach each other. Then the gray men began to come up the slope, and there were thousands of them. But shell yielded to canister, and the muskets of the infantry sent out death in leaden
