Yours, pacifically,
Orpheus C. Kerr.
LETTER CVIII.
NARRATING THE UTTERLY UNPARALLELED CONQUEST OF PARIS BY THE VENERABLE MACKEREL BRIGADE, AFTER THREE DAYS' INCONCEIVABLE STRATEGY; IN FACT, A BATTLE-REPORT AFTER THE MANNER OF ALL OUR EXCITED MORNING JOURNALS; UPON PERUSING WHICH, EACH READER IS EXPECTED TO WRAP HIMSELF UP IN THE AMERICAN FLAG AND SHAKE HIS FIST AT COMBINED EUROPE.
Washington, D.C., April 4th, 1865.
To loud huzzas our flag ascends, as climbs a flame the dizzy mast, while all its burning glory bends from where the planets seal it fast; and, pliant to the chainless winds, a blazing sheet, a lurid scroll, the Compact of the Stars it binds in fire that warms a nation's soul!
All of which, my boy, is the poetry of that banner whose union of a starry section of evening with the hues of dawn and sunset makes it a very good marriage-certificate of the wedding of old Mr. Day and the Widow Night. (Let us hope that Mr. Day will never be without a sun.)
And do you ask me wherefore I thus burst into red-hot song?—wherefore I inflict further verses upon a flag already washed almost to pieces in a freshet of poet's tears?—wherefore I jingle rhymes of Bostonian severity at the commencement of an epistle whose readers may not all be Emersons?
Know, then, my boy, that the chant is to celebrate the conquest of the ancient City of Paris, which, for many years past, has actually waxed prosperous against Mackerel strategy, but now rests a prize beneath that glorious bunting which we all like to see our poor relations die for: beneath that ensign of freedom for which every man of us would willingly sacrifice his life, did he not feel that his first great duty was to his helpless family, who like to have him stay at home and take them to the opera.