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[86] rest of that company like the flood-tide after the ebb. Next day he went to see where Smith was going to open the road. That night he wrote leaf after leaf of despatches, brief, forcible, unambiguous, and with scarcely a change of a word or a pause to choose one; for such was his great power in this matter of writing what he had to say. He ordered up Sherman from Corinth where Halleck's railroad-building was delaying that general. He sent reassuring messages to Halleck about Burnside, who was threatened in East Tennessee. As we think of him during these days, reeling off orders and pulling the scattered shreds of mismanagement together, he seems like a quietly spinning dynamo which, silent and unnoticed, in a small house, supplies the current that drives a great system of moving wheels. At midnight on the 27th General Smith began, and at ten next morning brilliantly finished, his opening of the new road.

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