Sick of this dreadful slaughter, my boy, I turned from the spot with Villiam, and presently overtook the general of the Mackerel Brigade, who was seated on a fence by the roadside, trying to knock the cork out of a bottle with a piece of rock. We saluted, and went on to the camp.
Sharpshooters, my boy, are a source of much pain to hostile gunners, and if one of them should happen to put a bullet through the head of navigation, it would certainly cause the tide to fall.
Yours, take-aimiably,
Orpheus C. Kerr.
LETTER XLIII.
CONCERNING MARTIAL LITERATURE: INTRODUCING A DIDACTIC POEM BY THE "ARKANSAW TRACT SOCIETY," AND A BIOGRAPHY OF GARIBALDI FOR THE SOLDIER.
Washington, D.C., May 7th, 1862.
Southern religious literature, my boy, is admirably calculated to improve the morals of race-courses, and render dog-fights the instruments of wholesome spiritual culture.
On the person of a high-minded Southern Confederacy captured the other day by the Mackerel pickets, I found a moral work which had been issued by the Arkansaw Tract Society for the diffusion of religious thoughts in the camp, and was much improved by reading it. The pure-minded Arkansaw chap who got it up, my boy, remarked in pallid print, that every man "should extract a wholesome moral from everything whatsomedever," and then went on to say that there was an excellent moral in the beautiful Arkansaw nursery tale of