"Ah!" says the Mackerel picket, leaning upon his musket, and looking dreamily over the water, "he's all the time retiring—he's been put upon the 'Retired' list."
Here was a man, my boy, an American, like you or me, brought up in a country where education is free to all, and yet he had no clearer idea of the functions of our Naval Retiring Board than such as happened to be suggested to his instinct by what he could see of the national blockade service!
Yours, amazedly,
Orpheus C. Kerr.
LETTER XCVII.
INTRODUCING THE GREAT MORAL EXHIBITION OF THE "EFFIGYNIA," GLANCING AT A FOURTH NEW MACKEREL GENERAL, AND SHOWING HOW THE PRESIDENT'S DRAFT ON ACCOMAC WAS PROTESTED AT SIGHT.
Washington, D.C., July 10th, 1863.
As I wax numerous in exciting years, my boy, and observe more and more of the long-headed and strategic manner in which our wealthy but distracted country prosecutes the Restoration of the Union, the stronger grows my belief that, inasmuch as the way of the transgressor is hard, the way of the well-doer is inexpressibly "soft." Each day of the present national crisis brings fresh evidence of the exceedingly soft character of the policy by which our upright government would turn to nought the wrathful devices of its enemies, and further demonstrates the vast difference existing between everything upright and anything downright. We discomfit the well-known Southern Confederacy, at every turn, my boy,—we discomfit it at every turn; but, the trouble is, we keep turning all the time, like a Thomas cat after his tail, constantly believing that we are approaching the end, but never quite reaching it.
Fearing lest I should become metaphysical if I pursued this train of thought any farther,—thereby encroaching upon the bottomless province of the Awful and Unfathomable German mind, which rejoices gloomily in the solemn investigation of all that verges upon muddled abstraction;—fearing lest I should become thus erudite, profound, and snuffily unintelligible, my boy, I repress my morbid inclination to take a funereal canter into abstruse speculation on the elephants of thought, and digress from theory to fact.