was a monomaniacal Gentile. Who could make out a mental diagnosis, or
anticipate the conduct of a mule afflicted with religious lunacy? Well
for your correspondent had he discovered beforehand the bias of the
brute, or suspected he was a quadruped zealot! Much might have been
saved to him, and more to a number of unoffending gentlemen from
church, as the sequel of my 'o'er true tale' will prove.

"The train got off about eight o'clock, on a cloudy, rainy, muddy,
suicidal morning, and the material that composed it was worthy of
illustration by Cruikshank. The procession was singularly varied, and
supremely bizarre. There were the army-wagons, with sick and wounded
soldiers, lumbering heavily along; the paroled prisoners wading
through the mire; cotton-buyers, on foot and on horseback; members of
the twelve tribes of Israel, with all possible modes of conveyance--in
broken buggies, in dilapidated coaches, on bare-boned Rosinantes, on
superannuated oxen, with fragmentary reins, rope reins, and no reins;
spurring, swearing, hallooing, and gesticulating toward Memphis, in
mortal terror lest the rebels would capture them again, and some of
their hard-earned gains. Pauvre Juils! They would have excited the
pity of a pawnbroker, if he had not known them, so frightened and
anxious and disconsolate they looked. They could not have appeared
more miserable if they had just learned that a brass watch they had
sold for silver had turned out gold. The mule trotted along briskly
and quietly enough until he beheld the grotesque vision of the
heterogeneously-mounted Israelites. Then he displayed most
extraordinary conduct. He pawed, he hawed, he kicked, all the while
glancing at the sons of Jerusalem, and braying louder and more
discordant every moment. I could not understand the mule's
idiosyncrasies. Possibly, I thought, the doctrine of the
metempsychosis may be true, and this brute, in the early stages of its
development, once have been in love. He has a fit on him now, I
fancied--he is once more possessed of a petticoat. Why not? If love
converts men into asses, why should not asses, in their maddest
moments, act like men in love? The mule's ire was culminating. I dug
my spurs into his side. Vain effort! He was bent on mischief, and
malignant against the persecuted race. If he had been in the House of
Commons, (and many of his brethren are there,) I know he never would
have voted for the admission of Jews into the English Parliamen