LETTER LXVII.
GIVING ASSURANCE OF THE UNMITIGATED SAFETY OF THE CAPITAL, EXEMPLIFYING COLONEL WOBINSON's DRAFTING EXPERIENCE, AND NARRATING A GREAT METAPHYSICAL VICTORY.
Washington, D. C., September 5th, 1862.
Everything is confident and buoyant here, my boy, a sense that the President is an honest man, inspiring confidence on every side, and surrounding the Government with well-known confidence men. The repeated safety of the Capital, indeed, has even inspired the genius of New England, as illustrated by a thoughtful Boston chap, with one of those enlarged business ideas which will yet enable that section to betrade the whole world. The thoughtful Boston chap has read all the war-news, my boy, for the last six months, and as he happens to be a moral manufacturer of burglar-proof safes, a happy pecuniary thought struck him forcibly. After joining the church, to make sure of his morality here, he came hither in haste, opened an establishment, read the war-news once more, and then issued the following enterprising card:
BUY THE CELEBRATED
WASHINGTON SAFE!
Everybody thought it was the safe they'd read so much about in the papers, my boy, and several hundreds were sold.
There was another chap, named Burns, the inventor of a Family and Military Gridiron, who noticed how the thoughtful Boston chap was making money by the advertising necessities of our distracted country. Having been born in Connecticut at a very early age, my boy, he was not long in finding a way to make his own eternal fortune, after the same meritorious manner. So he at once repaired to a liquor shop, to make sure that a majority of our staff-officers would hear him, and then, says he, in stentorian tones:
"My sympathies are all with the Southern Confederacy, to whom I send the weekly journals of romance on the day of publication. As to the Union," says the Connecticut chap, hotly, "I have less confidence in it than I have in my Patent Economical Family and Military Gridiron."