As I make it a practice to pay all my honest debts, my boy, and have never flagellated a person of African descent, I could not properly come under the head of "Chivalry" in an American dictionary, though I might possibly come under its feet in the "Union-as-it-Was;" yet I have that in my nature which revolts at the thought of a war against women, and am sufficiently chivalrous to defend any cause whose effects are crinoline. The bell-shaped structure called Woman, my boy, was created expressly to conquer unresisting adversaries; to win engagements without receiving a blow, and to do pretty much as she pleases, by pleasing pretty much as she does. She is a harmless creation of herself, my boy; and to war directly against her because she may chance to influence her male friends to war against us, is about as sensible as it would be to execrate our hatter because a gust of wind blows our new beaver into the mud. If the hatter had not made the hat, the wind could not have blown it off, and if God had not made women, she could not encourage the well-known Southern Confederacy against us; but shall we turn enemy to the hatter, or to the woman, on this account? Not if we know ourselves, my boy, and recognize the high moral spirit of justice observable in the Constitution.
Being thus possessed of a reverence for that sex whose bonnets remind me of cake-baskets, I cannot refrain from frowning indignantly upon that horrible spirit of national tyranny which has inspired Sergeant O'Pake, of the demoralized Mackerel Brigade, to issue the following
"GENERAL ORDER."
"For the purpose of simplifying national strategy to those conservative women of America who, while engaged in the pursuit of happiness as guaranteed by the Constitution, desire to visit the Southern Confederacy, it is ordered that they shall answer the following paternal questions before passing the lines of the Mackerel Brigade:
| "I. | For how many years has your age been Just Twenty-two? |
| "II. | How many novels do you consume per week? |
| "III. | Were you ever complained of to the authorities for inordinate piano-forte playing? |
| "IV. | Do you work slippers for the heathen? |
| "V. | If so; for whatHe, then? |
| "VI. | What newspaper's 'Marriages and Deaths' do you consider the best? |
| "VII. | In selecting a church to attend, what colored prayer-book do you find most becoming to your complexion? |
| "VIII. | How much display of neck do you consider necessary to indicate a Modesty which shrinks from showing an ankle? |
| "IX. | Did you ever stoop to folly? or is it Folly alone that stoops to you? |
| "X. | Did you ever eat as much as you wanted at dinner, when members of the opposite sex were opposite? |
"It is also ordered that no female visitor to the celebrated Southern Confederacy shall carry more than eight large trunks and a bonnet-box for each month in the year; and that no female shall pass the line, whose dimensions in full dress exceed the ordinary space between two pickets, as the latter will, on no account be permitted to edge away from their stations at this trying crisis in the history of our distracted country.
"O'Pake,
"Sergeant Mackerel Brigade."
This inhuman order had scarcely been issued when there came to the Mackerel lines in front of Paris a virtuous young female, aged 23 with the figures reversed, who was disgusted with the great vulgarity of the North, and wished to visit the marriageable Southern Confederacy, having heard that the Confederacy was carefully Husbanding its resources. Being a poor girl, with "nothing to wear," she only had seven Saratoga trunks, ten bandboxes, fourteen small carpet-bags, and a lap-dog; yet the ill-bred O'Pake was suspicious enough to examine one of her trunks.
He ruthlessly opened it in her presence, my boy, and quickly met with the horrible fate which was at once immortalized by the Mackerel Chaplain in the following awful presentment: