As I was saying: As I sit down to cover a few slips—it seems to me that I have already filled out one slip of the paper; and, by the by, that reminds me of a bright thing that Ben Zoleen,[5] a bachelor friend of mine, allowed himself to be the father of, the other day. Ben likes to 'take something,' and about a month ago he took the 'enrolment.' An Irishman, after laying claim to the usual disability—lameness somewhere, and besides 'he was all the man that his wife Joanna had to work for the family'—swore that all the property he had in the world was a big porker, and he had broken out and run away 'the divil knows where,' the day before. 'Well, Mike,' said Ben, with a sympathizing tear, 'yours is not the first fortune that's been lost in this country by a mere slip of the pen' Whist! d'ye hear that?
The thought that first presented itself was the inquiry whether a man—
'Not that man, but another man,' interrupted me just then by coming into the office and communicating the startling, yet not entirely unexpected intelligence that 'they had begun to draft here in P.' 'No,' said I. 'Yes,' said he, going out in a hurry; 'up at the brewery.'
-Whether a man ought to write anything else than a love letter, in the frame of mind that Voltaire said that document should be composed in: 'Beginning without knowing what you are going to say, and ending without knowing a word of what you have said.'
What do you think about it? I think so, decidedly.
Hibbles.
We have heard of many an instance where the expression was not that exactly of the idea that was intended; but in the following 'the idea, the expression,' and everything else, are about as thoroughly mixed up as one could well conceive. We were questioning a young lady as to the standing of a clergyman in the town where she lived. 'Oh,' said she, 'he is too popular to be liked very much.' Identical! A favorite, we are told, 'has no friends;' when a poor fellow gets to be popular in the town of C——, we pity him.
Dick Wolcott, of the Tenth Illinois—which has seen no little service since the war began—hath written unto us a letter, from which we pick out the following. A great gossip is this same Dickon of ours, and a rare good fellow: