what heightens his qualities for the peculiarly grave emergency that confronted him."

General Meade did not receive the promotion to which many thought that his great services at the battle of Gettysburg entitled him; "and he went down to his grave," says Colonel McClure, "one of the sorrowing and unrewarded heroes of the war." He died in Philadelphia in November, 1872, in a house which had been presented to his wife by his countrymen. A fund of one hundred thousand dollars was, after his death, subscribed for his family.

GEORGE H. THOMAS,

THE GREAT UNION GENERAL.

AME," says Horace Greeley, "is a vapor; popularity an accident." No one of the great commanders whose skill and courage won victory for the nation in the great civil war better exemplifies the truth of Greeley's saying than General Thomas. His abilities were of the very highest order. "He was," says a most competent critic, "one of the very few commanders who never committed a serious military error, who never sacrificed a command, and who never lost a battle." His private character was without a stain. He was the ideal of a soldier and a gentleman. Yet, as he was too modest to seek promotion or conspicuous position, his fame is small indeed in comparison with the value of the services he rendered to the country.

George Henry Thomas was born in Southampton county, Virginia, on July 31, 1816. He was graduated from West Point in 1840, and won promotion for bravery in the Mexican war. At the outbreak of the civil war he was in Texas, but reported at once for duty, and was placed in command of a brigade in Northern Virginia.

General Thomas especially distinguished himself during the war in three great battles, the first in Kentucky, where, in January, 1862, he defeated the Confederate general, Zollikoffer, at Mill Spring, on the Cumberland river. This was the first real victory of the war; and for it General Thomas received the thanks of the Legislature, but no promotion. The chivalrous generosity with which he refused promotion when it was offered at the expense of others, stood in his way throughout the whole war, and he at no time held the rank to which he was justly entitled.

The second of Thomas's great battles was that of Chickamauga, in September, 1863. In this battle it was Thomas alone who saved the Union army from utter ruin. The scene of the conflict was in the mountains of East Tennessee, when Bragg attempted to capture Chattanooga and the roads leading to it. Again and again the Confederate troops assaulted Thomas's position, behind a rude