"By our celerity and secrecy of movement, both in crossing and re-crossing Duck Lake, we neither pursued, nor were pursued by, a Rebel.
"The events of the last week may swell with pride the feet of every officer and soldier in this Brigade.
"We have made long marches and countermarches, crossed and re-crossed lakes, surprised the enemy by our advance, brought back seven pieces of our artillery, and given heavier blows than the wind.
"We have nothing to regret, save the loss of our brave companions, and in this we may be consoled by the conviction that they fell in the holiest cause ever left so exclusively to the care of Providence, that very little human intelligence was deemed necessary to direct its arbitrament in battle.
("Blue Seal.)
"The General of the Mackerel Brigade."
As we consider the vast world of animated nature, my boy, and mark what apparent simplicity there is in the structure of beast, bird, and reptile, does it not seem exceedingly strange, that all of man's vaunted ingenuity has thus far succeeded in making imitative approximation only to the insect kingdom,—the apparently least difficult of all,—and to thatonly by such a spurious kind of a bug as Humbug?
Yours, wonderingly,
Orpheus C. Kerr.