LETTER XXXVI.
CONCERNING THE WEAKNESSES OF GREAT MEN, THE CURIOUS MISTAKE OF A FRATERNAL MACKEREL, AND THE REMARKABLE ALLITERATIVE PERFORMANCE OF CAPTAIN VILLIAM BROWN.
Washington, D.C., March 20th, 1862.
When a wise, benign, but not altogether Rhode-Island Providence saw fit to deal out a few mountains to Eastern Tennessee and Western Virginia, my boy, it is barely possible that Providence had an eye to the present crisis of our subtracted country, and intended to furnish the coming Abe with a fit place for the lofty accommodation of such great men as were not in immediate demand among the politicians. I am not topographical by nature, my boy; I never went up to the top of the White Mountains to see the sun rise, and didn't see; nor did I ever scale Mount Blanc for the purpose of allowing a fog to settle on my lungs; but it's my private opinion, my boy, my private opinion, that, were it not for the perpendicular elevations of the earth's surface in the States named, it would be necessary for the honest Old Abe either to turn General Fremont into a reduced Consul, and commission him to furnish proofs of the nation's reverence for the name of Lafayette, or coop him up somewhere in solitary grandeur, like a rabbit in a Warren.
"Great men," says the General of the Mackerel Brigade, as he and I were looking at some sugar together, the other night, through concave glasses—"great men," says he, "are like the ears of black-and-tan terriers; they are good for ornaments, but you must cut off some of them when you would give them rats. Thunder!" says the general, taking a perpendicular view of the sugar—"if we didn't cut off great men occasionally, there'd be more presidential nominations to ratify next election than ever before struck terrier to the heart of an old-line whig."
But you have yet to learn, my boy, what was the great reason for sending Fremont to the everlasting hills. On Tuesday I asked a knowing veteran at Willard's what it really was. He looked at me for a moment in immovable silence; then he softly placed his spoon-gymnasium on a table, looked cautiously in all directions, crept up to my ear on tiptoe, and says he:
"Kerridges!"
"Son of a bottle!" says I, "your information is about as intelligible as the ordinary remarks of Ralph Waldo Emerson."
The knowing veteran suffered his nose to take a steam-bath for a moment, and then says he: