It is a remarkable and beautiful peculiarity of our flexible language, my boy, that its semi-syno-nymical effects permit the transmission of trying intelligence in terms of soothing similarity to those which might have been employed had the news been more felicitous. Thus are we let down easily from pride to humiliation, and spared much intervening agony of soul.
So the Mackerel Brigade turned their gleaming old spectacles once more in the direction of our National Capital, and are again a characteristic of the landscape enclosing Washington. Further consummate strategy is postponed for a time on account of the weather, which has become villanously hot through the fanatical machinations of the insidious Black Republicans. Thus are Greeley, Beecher, Wendell Phillips, and their deluded followers weakening the military arm of the government and endeavoring to obtain fat contracts for worthless fans!
Methinks I hear you ask, "Has the new general of the Mackerel Brigade made a failure, after all the credit the public have given him for superiority over his predecessors?"
Far be it from me to judge hastily, but I may be permitted to say, my boy,—I may be permitted to say, that men in the military line have this point in common with men in a mercantile business; by obtaining too much on credit at the start, they are very apt to make bad failures, leaving nothing but their lie-abilities for the consolation of those who trusted them.
Upon reaching the Mackerel camp, and exchanging festive salutations with Captain Bob Shorty, who was trying to purchase the dressed skin of a handsome copperhead snake from Corporal Veller, of the California Reserve, to use as a sword-belt,—after exchanging salutations, I repaired to the tent of the chaplain, to witness the marriage of one of the younger Mackerels to a pretty Shenandoah belle. As the happy pair stood before the drum to be made wife and man, I noticed that the bride's rosy cheeks paled like a sunset under the twilight, until the languishing stars of her eyes shone only upon snow.
And now, my boy, let me say a few words respecting the recent attempted draft of Abe L. bodied men in thrice-famous Accomac, and the freedom-loving spirit in which it was met by the Sovereign People. With a prescient view to being amply prepared for an overwhelming assault upon combined Europe, which is shortly to be made by Secretary Seward and the muscular United States of America, our Uncle Abe ordered a draft of Accomackians to be made at once. Hereupon the Accomac "Morning Dog," an excellent daily journal, indulged in a high-minded editorial on the fiendish proclivities of the Governor of Accomac, and the general wildness of all the Accomackians to be drafted if he would let them. With great promptness, that admirable palladium of human freedom, the "Evening Cat," avowed that it spit upon the gubernatorial scurrility of its growling contemporary; that it deprecated mob violence and trusted that no mob would resist the draft; but could not help believing that the Sovereign People might possibly arise in their majesty and occasion a speedy funeral in the family of the editor-in-chief of the venomous and intolerable "Morning Dog."
It was at 10 o'clock a.m., my boy, when the drafting commenced in Accomac, and in half an hour thereafter the Sovereign People, consisting of several gentlemen from Ireland, were asserting the dignity of a free community in a manner worthy of the sacred cause of Emigration. It is a touching fact, my boy,—a touching and æsthetical fact, that the American people are ever so able to find foreign champions to protect their freedom from governmental infringement that they seldom have occasion to do any fighting for it themselves.
The Sovereign People of Accomac, being fully aroused and slightly inebriated, proceeded to vindicate the majesty of our excellent national Democratic Organization by relieving a bloated aristocracy of their watches and loose change, ransacking sundry private residences on account of the great draft of their chimneys, and performing other awe-inspiring acts of rude majesty, equally well calculated to evince a freeborn people's distaste for despotism. Furthermore, the Sovereign People fearlessly attacked a large and aristocratic Hospital, beating many of the patients to death; for, by some corrupt chicanery, these patients were barefacedly exempted from the Conscription which bore so heavily upon the down-trodden and healthy poor man. The "Evening Cat," in a special edition, was genial enough to express a hope that "the outraged people now muttering ominously in the air," would not burst upon the office and editor of the "Morning Dog" with toomuch just fury; whereupon the incensed Sovereign People said that, be jabers, they'd come mighty near forgetting that entirely; and forthwith proceeded to stone the office of the "Dog" until the hasty discharge of an ink-stand from one of the upper windows thereof induced them to make a hasty change of base.
Without indulging in farther details, suffice it to say that the Sovereign People finally desisted from their struggle for liberty upon being satisfied that no more watches, purses, nor sick despots were to be got at conveniently, and the "Evening Cat" came out in a spirited article in favor of an immediate war with France.
How grateful should it be to our national pride, my boy, that even the stranger that is within our gates feels inspired by the very atmosphere with a jealous, a fighting love for perfect freedom,—especially if said gates be those of a State prison.