ening" among the Children of the New Abrahamic
Covenant--"Brudder Jones's Preechin'"--What it Wrought--Unpleasant
Truths--Sins of Omission and Commission--The Pale-Faced Settlers in
Distress--An "Artifice" of Retrenchment--Eloquent
Discourse--Nineteenthly, and what followed--K. K. K.
_redivivus_--"Tramp, Tramp, Tramp, the Boys are Marching, etc."--A
Break for Tall Timber--The Best Time on Record.

Whether it is located in the brain, or has its seat in that sentient organ
of the body which physiologists indicate as the seat of life, we are left
to conjecture; but it is certain that there exists somewhere in the
anatomy of man an essence, or attribute, which, under certain outward
conditions, becomes the tyrant of his movements, and renders the
disposition to cultivate acquaintance with other vistas a passion too
strong to be resisted. Philosophers tell us that "self-preservation is the
first law of life," but their efforts to connect this postulate with some
rational conclusion deduced from the organism of the animal under
discussion, is so egregiously wanting in the elements of a sound
syllogism, that we are led to believe that it has no foundation in fact,
and that they only meant to say that where the emotion denominated _fear_
assumes the reigns of physical government, an open road and fair play are
all that is required to render the proposed achievement a success. It is
useless to tell us that men, adopting the improved modes of destroying
life which this Christian age has developed, stand up to explode missiles
at each other under the persuasion that they are doing something that will
tend to preserve life; or, if that were not false doctrine, who that ever
attended one of these tournaments of bad shooting is unable to testify to
the overpowering conviction that the parties thereto would have enjoyed
themselves better in a free exercise of their limbs--

"Over the meadows and far away."

Having examined into the philosophy of this question, with a view solely
of removing certain doubts inherited from the professions of a warlike
ancestry, and, predisposed to err in the opposite direction, we have
arrived at the conclusion, _once for all_, that the "git up and git"
tendencies of mankind, when the proper incentives are at hand, are as
absolutely irresistible as the water-fall at Niagara, and as necessary to
the happiness of the subject as the barriers that separate him from his
mot