Our latest cavalry dashes, my boy, being reduced to their simplest meaning, signify devised charges of cavalry, which are based upon charges of artillery, which have forgotten to bring any charges with them.
Yours, retreatingly,
Orpheus C. Kerr.
LETTER LXXXIX.
SHOWING HOW THE GREAT CITY OF ROME HAS BEEN RUINED BY THE WAR; CITING A NOTABLE INSTANCE OF CONTEMPT OF COURT; DESCRIBING REAR ADMIRAL HEAD'S WONDERFUL IMPROVEMENT IN SWIVEL GUNS; AND PROVING THAT ALL IS NOW READY FOR THE REDUCTION OF FORT PIANO.
Washington, D.C., March 29th, 1863.
After due consideration of the different points of the Compass, and a fair estimate of the claims of each to superiority, I am inclined to give the preference to the Great North-west. It is to the Great North-west that we are indebted for our best facilities of sunset; some of the greatest hogs of the day come from Cincinnati; the principal smells of the age belong to Chicago, and the whiskey of Louisville has almost entirely superseded the pump of our forefathers. Hence, my boy, it was with a feeling akin to reverence that I witnessed the arrival in Accomac of a delegation of high moral Democratic chaps from the Great North-west, the other day; their mission being, to protest against all further continuation of a war which was degenerated into a mere bloodshed for the sake of New England; and to suggest that a convention of all the States be at once held in Kentucky, to arrange a peace that shall be acceptable to the Great North-west. I was asking the thoughtful chairman of the delegation what were his particular grievances, and says he:
"This war is ruining much valuable Real Estate in the Great North-west, of which I and my fellow-beings are proprietors; and cannot continue without proving the entire destruction of some of our largest cities. Just before this war broke out," says the thoughtful chap, impressively, "I gave a three-years' note of seven hundred and sixteen dollars and fifteen cents for the city of Rome, situated on the future line of the Atlantic and Pacific Canal, and divided into four hundred water-lots of five fathoms each. As soon as the Atlantic and Pacific Canal was built, the water would have been drawn off by means of eighteen large hydraulic pumps supported by Eastern capital, leaving the lots all ready for building purposes. The main street would then have been graded, and paved with the new patent Connecticut sub-drainage pavement, and would have extended two miles in a perfectly straight line, with a horse-railroad through the centre. The various intersecting streets I should have named numerically, commencing with 'First Street,' which faces upon the Atlantic and Pacific Canal, and so going on to 'One Hundred and Seventy-sixth street,' and so on. These streets would have been occupied exclusively by brown-stone-front residences, with a flag-staff bearing our national banner on the roof of each one, and rented to small private families without children. The full lots on the main street would have been used for the City Hall, the Lunatic Asylum, the Custom House, the Home for Deranged Persons, the Merchants' Exchange, the Corn Exchange, the Refuge for the Insane, the Grain Elevator, the Institution for Friendless Maniacs, the Principal Pork-Packing Establishment, the Hall of Records, the Office of the Superintendent of Central Parks, the Madman's Snug Harbor, and the Municipal Bar-Room. The sixty-eight principal banks would have discounted bills of exchange at sight, for the benefit of the numerous foreign vessels constantly arriving at the principal pier by way of the Atlantic and Pacific Canal, and the Fire Department would have been limited to twenty-three hundred hose-carriages and engines, with an educated Chief Engineer." Here the thoughtful Democratic chap gnashed his teeth, and says he:
"But the City of Rome has been entirely retarded by this here Black Republican New England war upon the sunny South, with which the great North-west has no earthly quarrel whatsoever."