ipping--lost
eighty thousand--Fourth Michigan skedaddled '?

"How graphic will description become--how laconic all comment! You will
no more listen to one of the old circumlocutionary conversers than you
would travel by the waggon, or make a voyage in a collier.

"How, I would ask, could the business of life go on in an age active as
ours if all coinage was in copper, and vast transactions in money should
be all conducted in the base metal? Imagine the great Kings of Finance
counting over the debts of whole nations in penny-pieces, and you have
at once a picture of what, until a few years ago, was our intellectual
condition. How nobly Demosthenic our table-talk will be!--how grandly
abrupt and forensic!

"There is nothing, however, over which I rejoice more than in the
utter extinction of the anecdote-mongers--the insufferable monsters
who related Joe Millers as personal experiences, or gave you their own
versions of something in the morning papers. Thank heaven they are done
for!

"Last of all, the unhappy man who used to be sneered at for his silence
in company, will now be on a par with his fellows. The most bashful will
be able to blurt out, 'Poles massacred,' 'Famine in Ireland,' 'Feast at
the Mansion House,' 'Collision at Croydon,' 'Bank discount eleven.'

"Who will dare to propagate scandal, when all amplification is denied
him? How much adulteration will the liquor bear which is measured by
drop? Nor will the least of our benefits be the long, reflective
pauses--those brilliant 'flashes of silence' which will supersede the
noise, turmoil, and confusion of what we used to call conversation. No,
no, Corneli mi. The game is up. 'Our own Correspondent' is a piece that
has run its course, and there's nothing to do but take a farewell
benefit and quit the boards."

"If I could fall back on my pension like you, I'd perhaps take the
matter easier," said I, gruffly.

"Well, I think you ought to be pensioned. If I was a Minister, I'd
propose it. My notion is this: The proper subjects for pension are those
who, if not provided for by the State, are likely to starve. They are,
consequently, the class of persons who have devoted their lives to
an unmarketable commodity--such as poonah-painting, Berlin-wool work,
despatch-writing, and suchlike. I'd include 'penny-a-lining'--don't be
offended because you get twopence, perhaps. I'd pension the whole of
them--pretty much as I'd buy off the organ-man, and request him to m