Shall treason triumph in our land, my boy, while there's a sword to wave? I think not, my boy, I think not. Though Columbia did not rule the wave, her champions would see to it that she never waived the rule.
Yours, for the Star-Spangled,
Orpheus C. Kerr.
LETTER XXXIX.
SHOWING HOW A REBEL WAS REDUCED, AND CONVERTED TO "RECONSTRUCTION," BY THE VALOROUS ORANGE COUNTY HOWITZERS.
Washington, D.C., April 13th, 1862.
The stirring times are come again, the maddest of the year, and I am beginning to believe, my boy, that what is to be will be as what has been has. Though still without my Gothic charger, Pegasus, that symmetrical racer having been borrowed for a writing-desk by a Secretary of the Fronterior, I am enabled to keep up communications with the Mackerel corpse dammee down the river, and ten thousand star-spangled banners flash through my veins as I relate the recent great artillery expedition of the Orange County Howitzers.
It seems, my boy, that an intellectual member of the Mackerel Brigade got tired of investing Yorktown, and wandered away in pursuit of adventure. As he peregrinated in the neighborhood of a rebel domicil, he beheld what he took for the bird of our country, stalking out of the barnyard, and was taking measures to confiscate it, when the proprietor made his appearance, and says he:
"Hessian, spare that goose!"