"Now," says she, vivaciously, "is the very moment for the President to save our bleeding and bankrupt people, by paying four hundred millions of dollars to the sunny South for her losses in this war, and offering her such terms as may induce her to make that peace which is absolutely necessary to close the most accurate History of the War now sold to subscribers only."
Pause, my boy, ere you execrate the venerable Miss P. Hen; for there is more than one fidgety old lady tendering advice to the Government at this crisis; and the sisterhood is not without members who wear your own style of costume.
Yours, carefully,
Orpheus C. Kerr.
LETTER CIX.
WHICH ENDETH THE THIRD VOLUME OF THIS INEXPRESSIBLY VERACIOUS HISTORY OF THE WAR; AND SHOWETH HOW A GREAT REPUBLIC FINALLY OVERCAME ITS SURPASSINGLY MENDACIOUS FOES, AND HOW IT EVINCES ITS UNSPEAKABLE GRATITUDE TO PROVIDENCE FOR SUCH A VICTORY.
Washington, D.C., April 11th, 1865.
Look, my boy, upon the east wall of my luxurious presence-chamber, and mark how I have maliciously pasted thereon a map of besotted Europe; with all its capitals, rivers, mountains, and inland puddles laid down with an accuracy and multitudinosity to forever enlighten and utterly confound every sniffing little schoolboy-geographer in the land. What a shapeless chunk of inferior dirt is Europe! How like a minute and feeble skiptail does it appear, when compared with our own gigantic straddlebug of a country! Yet has the skiptail ventured to interfere offensively in the private affairs of the straddlebug; and the interference, and the private affairs, and the possible upshot of the whole matter, remind me forcibly of a spirited little event which once occurred in the Sixth Ward.
The male and female Michael O'Korrigan, my boy, occupied a spacious apartment on the fine, airy, eighth floor of the sumptuous Maison Mulligan in that celebrated Ward, and for several years the course of their true love ran so smoothly that it became hopelessly insipid and exasperating to all the old maids for blocks around. Nothing was ever equal to the peaceful unity of the male and female O'Korrigan; and did Michael find it necessary, in the course of some friendly discussion with a neighbor on the stairs, to call for a hatchet till he broke the ugly nose of the spalpeen, it was the wife of his bosom that handed him his own bit of a stick, and joined in the argument herself with a poker for a referee. But nothing's perfect in this world except the wisdom of owls and Congressmen, and Mrs. O'Korrigan's military virtues and wholesome command of her husband had the slight drawback of a constitutional taste for poteen. Michael expostulated with her by the hair, and remonstrated with her by the shoulders, and plead with her over the head; but all to no purpose; and he was greatly assisted and comforted by a bit of a preacher named Father O'Tod, who took care of everybody's virtue except his own. It was Father O'Tod that sat down beside her quite pious and comfortable, and