The New Year, my boy, dawns blithely upon our distracted country as accurately predicted by the Tribune Almanac; and having given much deep thought to the matter, I am impressed with the conviction that the first of January is indeed the commencement of the year. There is something solemn in the idea; it is the period when our tailors send in their little bills, and when fresh thoughts of the negro race steal upon our minds. How many New Years have arrived only to find the unoffending American, of African descent, a hopeless bondman, toiling in hopeless servitude, and wearing coarse underclothing! Occasionally, my boy, he would wear a large seal ring, but it was always brass; and now and then he would exhibit a large breastpin, but it was always galvanized. When I see my fellow-men here wearing much jewelry, I think of the unoffending negro, and say to myself, "from the same shop, by all that's bogus!"
'Twas on New-Year's Eve that I took prominent part in a great literary entertainment at the tent of Captain Villiam Brown, near the shore of Duck Lake; and responded to universal mackerel desire by sweetly singing an historical Southern
ROMAUNT.
I.
'Tis of a rich planter in Dixie I tell,
Who had for his daughter a pretty dam-sel;
Her name it was Linda De Pendleton Coates,
And large was her fortune in treasury notes.
Chorus.—Concisely setting forth the exact value of those happy treasury notes:
The treasury note of the Dixian knight