ading it thin, is it?) for the readers of'Old Con.,'--

By the way--a delicious phrase that same 'by the way,' that lets a man
turn in from the dusty road a brief while and enjoy a 'rare ripe' or a
juicy 'south side'--you ask me, in a genial note, Mr. Editor, what I
think of 'Old Con' as the 'family nickname.' Capital! The only objection
in the world that I have is, that it reminds me of 'Old Conn,' the
policeman, who used to loom up around corners with his big, ugly
features, to the terror of the small boys, when I was 'of that ilk.'
These huge, overgrown, slow hulks almost always 'pick on' the boys; the
real hard work of the force is done by your small, wiry fellows, who
step around lively, and don't stop to see whether a man is 'bigger nor
they.' Old Conn, though, was a pretty good-hearted man after all,
despite unpopularity among the juveniles; and so I say, let us christen
the youngster 'Old Con,' by all means--old in the affections of a host
of friends, if not in years.

But _revenons a nous moutons_, as the scribblers say, whose _mouton_ we
dare say is less often 'material' than we could wish it were.

As I set about penning a rambling thought, then, and--

_En passant_, did you never notice how a tendency to ramble will
sometimes almost completely control a man? A candidate for Congress, for
instance, comes round to your town to talk to you 'like a fa-ther'about
what? To tell you that he has made all his arrangements to go to
Washington? and could go just as well as not if you would like to have
him? and that, on the whole, he wants to go awfully? No, indeed; nine
cases out of ten the poor fellow forgets _himself_, and wanders off into
the 'glorious Constitution as our fathers framed it,' and the 'eternal
principles,' ' sacrifices' that one's constituency require, and a full
assortment of such phrase. Just as some of the speakers, at the 'war
meetings' this summer, get up a full head of patriotic steam, and in the
excitement of the moment 'don't remember' all about mentioning that they
are going themselves. Inclined to ramble!

But this wasn't what I meant to observe at the outset. Let us change the
subject, as they say at the medical college.

What I was about to remark originally was--and I don't know as it is
original, either. The fact is, there is very little now-a-days that is
strictly original--except war-correspondence, and of course nobody but
old maids reads _that_. There is a fellow who writes for