EXPLAINING, IN A LUCID AND PERFECTLY SATISFACTORY MANNER, THE POWERFUL INACTIVITY OF THAT PORTION OF THE VENERATED MACKEREL BRIGADE RESIDING BEFORE THE ANCIENT CITY OF PARIS, AND PRESENTING CERTAIN GENIAL DETAILS OF A RECENT FESTIVE CONGLOMERATION.
Washington, D.C., March 6th, 1865.
Methinks, my boy, that I see you sagely assuming a pair of massive ears, a pair of silver spectacles, and a blue cotton umbrella, for the purpose of accurately personating the celebrated Public Sentiment, and, in that gifted character, peremptorily requiring me to explain the present use of the venerable Mackerel Brigade!
Mastering for a moment the noble rage of the unimperilled patriot at a request so vulgarly practical, I sternly refer you to the latest able articles in all our exciting and learned morning journals; wherein you will be taught that such portion of the aged Mackerel organization as has of late years invested Paris is in reality the gorgeous Pivot around which revolve all the other brass buttons of ultimate national triumph. And is not each editor of these excellent and sanguine morning journals well qualified by his military genius to represent a General Ism, oh?
But perhaps, my boy, you fail to find ocular demonstration in that illumination. It is barely possible that you refuse to acknowledge optical conviction in a lucidity of that description. It may be that your cornea lacks ability to transmit a specific image in that polarization of prismatics. It strikes me as not improbable that you—can't see it in that light.
Then come with me to the Mackerel camp before Paris, and mark where the antique Brigade is sitting-up with the expiring Confederacy. Observe how each morning's sun is reflected from the gleaming spectacles of the venerable military organization; while occasional rains make those same innumerable glasses resemble fairy lakes with dead fish in them. Note with what a respectable air of a reliable family physician each patriarchal warrior exhumes, from somewhere down his leg, the massive gold watch which he has been induced to buy for $10 of one of those national benefactors in jewelry who advertise affectionately in our more parental weekly journals of romance—and remarks, oracularly:
"It being exactly three o'clock by this here nineteen-carat repeater, that air Confederacy has got just one hour less to live."
The fact, my boy, that this timely observation would apply with about equal accuracy to the whole human family, need not deter your insidious self from answering in the affirmative, when I ask you, calmly, if it does not seem that a military organization of such intellect, mustbe engaged in some unspeakably profound scheme of victory, even though to the uneducated eye it may present somewhat the aspect of a muddy old gentleman with his head against a stone-wall?
And this business of showing the possible identity of apparent dead-pause with actual velocity, reminds me of a chap I once knew in the Sixth Ward. He was a cast-iron chap, my boy, whose most powerful conception of enterprise in trade was vividly associated with the duty of being forever in his shirt-sleeves; and he kept a hardware shop at which the economical women of America could get such bargains in flat-irons and door-plates, as were a temptation to marry none but the most impoverished young men.
Many customers had this very practical hardware chap, and one of them was an aged file in a broad-brimmed hat, blue spectacles, and a silk umbrella, who had about him that air of Philadelphia which at once suggests an equal admixture of chronic slumber and profundity. Being a widower and a happy man, it was the daily custom of this aged file to spend several hours of intellectual refreshment in the hardware shop, smiling benignantly upon the ancient maidens who came thither to buy curling-tongs, and enlivening the soul of the cast-iron chap with fine, laborious treatises on the general idiocy of popular perception.