Other letters incidental to this business passed between the two paladins, my boy; but as the letters of all great men are proverbial for their great dignity and heaviness, and are immensely calculated to incline readers to untimely repose, I have spared you the infliction. Suffice it to say, that when Captain Villiam Brown read the Mackerel terms of surrender, he spasmodically applied his lips to a canteen, with the air of one who takes poison because the butcher's daughter has refused to be won by his manly shape.
"Ah!" says Villiam, "such magnanimity!"
Captain Bob Shorty was playing Old Sledge with three members of the Sanitary Commission when the document arrived.
"By all that's Federal!" says Captain Bob Shorty, "it appears to me—it really appears to me, Villiam, that I never see so much magnanimity!"
They took it to Captain Samyule Sa-mith as he sat by the roadside, straightening his highly-tempered sabre with a stone.
"I cannot always agree entirely with my brother officers on all points," says Samyule, reflectively, "for some of them are ineddicated: but I find in this document great magnanimity!"
Magnanimity, my boy, is the revenge of generous minds; as the venerable male parent feelingly observed when he made over his whole property to the interesting son who had just tried to poison him by putting arsenic into his coffee, and expressed an intention to burn him to death in his bed that night.
The glorious news of the surrender had no sooner reached the city of Paris than the aged and gifted Miss P. Hen organized an enthusiastic mass meeting of the decrepit Union element, and a speaker's stand was quickly erected, over which floated a banner inscribed
REGULAR MAGNANIMOUS NOMINATION
FOR