while Stuart, like a living screen, moved to and fro between
them.

Meanwhile McDowell's thirty-six thousand had marched past the
President with bands playing and colors flying amid a scene of
great enthusiasm. The press campaign was at its height; so was
the speechifying; and ninety-nine people out of. every hundred
thought Beauregard's twenty-two thousand at Bull Run would be
defeated in a way that would be sure to make the South give in.
McDowell had between two and three thousand regulars: viz., seven
troops of cavalry, nine batteries of artillery, eight companies
of infantry, and a little battalion of marines. Then there was
the immense paper army voted on the Glorious Fourth. And here,
for the general public to admire, was a collection of armed and
uniformed men that members of Congress and writers in the press
united in calling one of the best armies the world had ever seen.
Moreover, the publicity campaign was kept up unflaggingly till
the very clash of arms began. Reporters marched along and sent
off reams of copy. Congressmen, and even ladies, graced the
occasion in every way they could. "The various regiments were
brilliantly uniformed according to the aesthetic taste of peace,"
wrote General Fry, then an officer on McDowell's staff, and
"during the nineteenth and twentieth the bivouacs at Centreville,
almost within cannon range of the enemy, were thronged with
visitors, official and unofficial, who came in carriages from
Washington, were under no military restraint, and passed to and
fro among the troops as they pleased, giving the scene the
appearance of a monster military picnic."

Had McDowell been able to attack on either of these two days he