On Monday morning, just as the sun was rising, like a big gold watch "put up" at some celestial Simpson's, the sentinels of Fort Corcoran were seized with horrible tremblings at a sight calculated to make perpendicular hair fashionable. As far as the eye could reach on every side of the Capital, the ground was black with an approaching multitude, each man of which wore large spectacles, and carried a serious carpet-bag and a bottle-green umbrella.
"Be jabers!" says one of the sentinels, whose imperfect English frequently causes him to be taken for the Duc de Chartres, "it's the whole Southern Confederacy coming to boord with us."
"Aisey, me boy," says the other sentinel, straightening the barrel of his musket and holding it very straight to keep the fatal ball from rolling out, "it's the sperits of all our pravious descindants coming to ax us, was our grandmother the Saycretary of the Navy."
Right onward came the multitude, their spectacles glistening in the sun like so many exasperated young planets, and their umbrellas and carpet-bags swinging like the pendulums of so many infuriated clocks.
Pretty soon the advance guard, who was a chap in a white neck-tie and a hat resembling a stove-pipe in reduced circumstances, poked a sentinel in the ribs with his umbrella, and says he:
"Where's Congress?"
"Is it Congress ye want?" says the sentinel.
"Yessir!" says the chap. "Yessir. These are friends of mine—ten thousand six hundred and forty-two free American citizens. We must see Congress. Yessir!—dammit. How about that tax-bill? We come to protest against certain features in that bill."
"Murther an turf!" says the sentinel, "is it the taxes all of them ould chaps is afther blaming?"
"Yessir!" says the chap, hysterically jamming his hat down over his forehead and stabbing himself madly under the arm with his umbrella. "Taxes is a outrage. Not all taxes," says the chap with sudden benignity, "but the taxes which fall upon us. Why don't they tax them as is able to pay, without oppressing us ministers, editors, merchants, lawyers, grocers, peddlers, and professors of religion?" Here the chap turned very purple in the face, his eyes bulged greenly out, and says he: "Congress is a ass."