LETTER LVIII.
SHOWING HOW THE GENERAL OF THE MACKEREL BRIGADE ISSUED AN AFFECTING GENERAL ORDER; EXEMPLIFYING THE BEAUTIES OF A SPADE-CAMPAIGN AS EXHIBITED IN STRATEGY HALL, AND CELEBRATING A NOTABLE CASE OF NAVAL STRATEGY.
Washington, D. C., July 26th, 1862.
The high-minded and chivalrous Confederacy having refused to consider itself worsted in our recent great strategic victory near Paris, my boy, it only remained for the General of the Mackerel Brigade to commence undermining the Confederacy, after the manner of a civil engineer; and when last I visited the lines, I found a select assortment of Mackerels engaged in the balmy summer pastime of digging holes, and dying natural deaths in them.
There was one chap with an illuminated nose, who attracted my particular attention by landing a spade-full of sacred soil very neatly in my bosom, and says I to him:
"Well, my gallant sexton, how do the obsequies progress?"
"Beautiful," says he, pausing long enough to take a powder which the surgeon had left with him. "We've just struck a large vein of typhoid fever, and them air Peninsula veterans, which, you see in them holes yonder,
are already delirious with it. Really," says the chap, with an air of quiet enjoyment, as he climbed into the hospital litter, just sent after him—"really, there's a smart chance of pushing on our cemetery to Richmond before the roads become impassable again."