That meeting was not willed by a human mind, When we come to sift it. You say a fate rode a horse Ahead of those lumbering hosts, and in either hand He carried a skein of omen. And when, at last, He came to a certain umbrella-copse of trees That never had heard a cannon or seen dead men, He knotted the skeins together and flung them down With a sound like metal. Perhaps. It may have been so. All that we know is⁠—Meade intended to fight Some fifteen miles away on the Pipe Creek Line And where Lee meant to fight him, if forced to fight, We do not know, but it was not there where they fought. Yet the riding fate, Blind and deaf and a doom on a lunging horse, Threw down his skeins and gathered the battle there.