He was immediately arrested for this seditious talk, my boy, and all the reporters telegraphed an exciting dispatch to the reliable morning journals:
"Exciting Affair—Arrest of an Influential Rebel!—The celebrated Mr. Burns has been arrested for publicly saying that he had more confidence in his
well-known and ingenious patent Economical Family and Military Gridiron than he had in the Union. Upon hearing of his incarceration, the most sanguine rebel sympathizers here admitted that the cause of the South was lost forever."
The Connecticut chap remained in custody until he had received four hundred orders for gridirons, from private families and army-chaplains, and then he explained that the words he had used were uttered in the heat of passion, and he was, of course, honorably discharged from prison, to make way for a shameless, aged miscreant just committed for two years' hard labor, on suspicion of having discouraged enlistments by asserting that, although he was too old to go to the war himself, he intended to send a substitute.
Simultaneously, all the reporters telegraphed again to the reliable morning journals:
"The Burns Affair Settled!—Full Particulars of the Gridiron!—Mr. Burns, the celebrated inventor of the famous Patent Gridiron, has been honorably discharged by order of the Secretary of War. His inimitable Gridiron is destined to have an immense sale.
"It cooks a beafsteak in such a manner that the appetite is fully satisfied from merely looking at it, and the same steak will do for breakfast next morning. This is a great saving. Persons having nothing to eat find this Gridiron a great comfort, and hence the propriety of introducing it in the army."
The Gridirons are having a great sale, my boy, and
it is believed that the business interests of the country are being rapidly improved by the war.
Knowing that the Mackerel Brigade was making preparations to entrap the Southern Confederacy at Molasses Junction, I ascended to the upper gallery of my architectural steed, Pegasus, on Tuesday, in order that I might not be unduly hurried on my journey. Taking Accomac on my way to the battle-field, my boy, I called upon Colonel Wobert Wobinson, who is superintending preparations for the draft there, and was witness to an incident suitable to be recorded in profane history.