But to return to the present, suffer me to observe that last Wednesday was celebrated by the Mackerel Brigade in a manner worthy of the occasion. Two hundred turkeys belonging to the Southern Confederacy were served up for dinner, and from what I tasted, I am satisfied that they belonged to the First Families. They were very tough, my boy.
In the evening, there was a ball, to which a number of the women of America were invited. Captain Villiam Brown came up from Accomac on purpose to attend, and looked, as the General of the Mackerel Brigade genteelly expressed it, like a bag of indigo that had been out without an umbrella in a hard shower of brass buttons. The general has an acute perception of the Beautiful, my boy.
Villiam took the Oath six times, and then took a survey of the festive scene through the bottom of a tumbler. The first person he recognized was the youngest Miss Muggins, waltzing like a deranged balloon with Captain Bob Shorty. Captain Bob was spinning around like a dislocated pair of tongs, and smirked like a happy fiend. Villiam gave one stare, put the tumbler in his pocket, and then made a bee-line for the pair.
"Miss Muggins," says he, "you'll obleege me by dropping that air mass of brass buttons and moustaches, and dancing with me."
"I beg your parding, sir," says Miss Muggins, with dignity, "but I chooses my own company."
"Villiam," says Captain Bob Shorty, "if you don't take that big nose of yours away, it will be my painful duty to set it a little further back in your repulsive countenance."
Then Villiam was mad. He hastily buttoned his coat up to the neck, took a bite of tobacco, and says he:
"Captain Shorty, we have lived like br-r-others; I have borrowed many a quarter of you; and you promised that when I died, you would wrap me up in the American flag. But now you are mine enemy, and—ha! ha!—I am yours. Wilt fight?"
'Twas enough!
"I wilt," responded Captain Bob Shorty. And in ten minutes' time these desperate men stood face to face on the banks of the Potomac, the ghastly moon looking solemnly down upon them through a rift of floating shrouds; and one of the First Families of Virginia pickets squinting at them from a neighboring bush. Villiam's second was Colonel Wobert Wobinson of the Western Cavalry, Captain Bob Shorty's was Samyule Sa-mith. The fifth of the party was a fat surgeon from St. Louis, who stood with his sleeves rolled up and a big jack-knife in his hand. The surgeon also had a stomach pump with him, my boy, and twelve boxes of anti-bilious pills. The weapons were pistols, and the distance seventy paces.