Yours, if it come to that,
Orpheus C. Kerr.
LETTER LXXV.
SETTING FORTH THE FALSE AND TRUE ASPECTS OF BEAMING OLD AGE RESPECTIVELY, AND SHOWING HOW THE UNBLUSHING CONFEDERACY MADE ANOTHER RAID.
Washington, D. C., October 19th, 1862.
It is a beautiful and improving thing, my boy, to see the wise and polished mob of a great nation paying unmitigated reverence to fussy gray hairs, and much shirt collar; and hence I never grew tired of considering the dignified case of the Venerable Gammon, whom everybody regards as the benign paternal relative of his country. When I see Generals, Senators, and other proprietors of Government property, hanging breathlessly upon the words of this sublime old man, just as though such words were so many gallows, I feel the cause of Justice typified to my mind's eye, and am myself enthusiastic enough to believe that hanging is too good for them. Whether at Willard's, the White House, the Capitol, or in his native Mugville, the Venerable Gammon is ever the same beneficent being, beaming blandly upon the whole universe from above his ruffles, and paternally permitting it to exist in his presence.
The precise thing he has done in his fearfully long
lifetime, my boy, to beget such an agony of love and worship from everybody, has not yet come to the immediate knowledge of anybody; but he is the moss-grown oracle of the United States of America, and it gives me unspeakable satisfaction to reproduce as follows, his benign letter of advice to the idolized General of the Mackerel Brigade:
Mugville, July 4, 1776.