When the editor noticed my presence, he scowled so that his spectacles dropped off.
"Ha, my fine little fellow," says he, hastily; "I don't want to buy any poetry to-day."
"Don't fret yourself, my venerable cherub," says I; "I don't deal in poetry at present. I just came here to tell you that if you don't stop writing treason, I'll suppress you in the name of the United States."
"You're a mudsill mob," says he; "and I don't allow no violent mobs around this office. I am an American citizen, and I won't stand no mobs. What does the Constitution say about newspapers? Why, the Constitution don't say anything about them; so you've got no Constitutional authority for mobbing me."
"Then take the Oath," says I.
He looked at me for a moment, and then passed me a small black bottle. I held it up over my eyes for some time, to see if it was perfectly straight, and he remarked that if all Northerners took the Oath as freely as I did, they must be a water-proof conglomeration of patriots. I believe him, my boy!
The Mackerel Brigade has established a cookery department for itself, and is using a stove recently patented by the colonel of Regiment 5. This stove is a miraculous invention, and has already made fortunes for six cooks and a scullion. You put a shilling's worth of wood into it, which first cooks your meat and then turns into two shilling's worth of charcoal; so you make a shilling every time you kindle a fire.
Yesterday, a gentleman, brought up to the oyster-trade, and who has made several voyages on the Brooklyn ferry-boats, exhibited the model of a new gun-boat to the Secretary of the Navy. He said its great advantage was that it could easily be taken to pieces; and the Secretary was just going to order seventy-five for use in Central Park, when it leaked out that when once the gun-boat was taken to pieces there was no way of putting it together again. Only for this, my boy, we might have a gun-boat in every cistern.
Yours, nautically,
Orpheus C. Kerr.