ily withdrawing, he threatened to telegraph it verbatim to the
insurgents; it would fire the Southern heart.

SEWARD said he was going home, as he had already sent the _Powhatan_ to
PICKENS.

Mr. LINCOLN yawned, and turning to me, inquired: "Well, SARSFIELD, you
see what a man's got to do to run this machine,--now what's your
advice?"

"Your Excellency," I replied, "there's a man in the tanning business at
Galena, in your State. Telegraph him at once. His name is GRANT, and if
you give him the tools to work with, he'll straighten everything out for
you as neat as a pin."

The meeting dissolved without taking heed of my suggestion, and the
world knows the result. However, there's one thing I am proud of. I
claim to have discovered GRANT four years before WASHBURN did. That's
the secret why I can have any office I want under the present
administration.

SARSFIELD YOUNG.

* * * * *

THE PLAYS AND SHOWS.

The popularity of opera among fashionable people in this city varies
inversely as the intelligibility of the language in which it is sung.

To illustrate! The Italian opera is fashionable, though not one in ten
of the people composing an average audience understand a word that is
said or sung. The French opera is less fashionable, but perhaps
one-third of the audience can understand the less ingenious of the
indelicate jokes. The English opera is not fashionable, but every one
can understand every word that Miss RICHINGS or Miss HERSEE pronounces.
These facts undoubtedly stand in the relation of cause and effect.
Wherefore the axiom with which this column begins.

To be sure, the words of an opera are a matter of very little
consequence, the music speaking as plainly as the clearest of Saxon
sentences. But the fashionable public knows less of music than it knows
of languages, and would be quite capable of mistaking "_Gran Dio_" for a
comic song, and "_Libiamo_" for a lover's lamentation, were not the
translated libretto of _Traviata_ at hand to supply them and the critics
of the minor papers, with the cue for the display of appropriate
emotion. Singers, especially, understand the full force of the above
stated axiom. Hence, those who are deficient in voice avoid the English
stage. Miss KELLOGG, for example, never attempted English opera, because
she knew that people who had heard ROSE HERSEE or CAROLINE RICHINGS
would laugh at her claim to be "the greatest living Prima Donna," sh