mac, on any one of these fair
May days, and look around you in any direction, there is a beauty even
about the tracks of war which enables you to comprehend why so many of
our brass-buttoned generals are fond of staying in one spot so long.
Behind you rise Arlington Heights, which are disliked by our excellent
National Democratic Organization, only because they wear a covering of
Lincoln green in summer; before you, and across the Potomac is the
Capitol of our distracted country, looking like an ambitious
marble-yard on its way out of town; and close beside you is one of our
national troops extracting certain wonders of the insect kingdom from a
Government biscuit. On Tuesday, I was standing with the Conservative
Kentucky chap near Long Bridge, surveying this scene, and says I,--

"Behold, my Nestor, how the scars left upon Nature's face by the
chariot wheels of War are turning into dimples, and all the twinkling
curves of a placid smile."

"Yes," says he, hastily picking up the Jack of Diamonds which he had
accidentally drawn from his pocket with his handkerchief,--"the scene
is somewhat pleasant; but not equal to Kentucky, where there is more
rye."

Here the Kentucky chap became so deeply affected that he was compelled
to smell a cork which he took from his vest pocket, and says he,--

"Kentucky raised a great deal of rye before the breaking out of this
here fatal war with the Southern Confederacy, with whom Kentucky is
connected by marriage; she raised it by the bottle; in which form it
becomes, as it were, the crowning glory of agriculture. Ah!" says the
Conservative Kentucky chap, stirring an invisible beverage with an
imaginary spoon, "how softly on my senses steals Kentucky's national
anthem,--

"'If a body meet a body,
Comin' through the rye.'

"And the Old Rye of Kentucky is famous for its body." The Kentucky chap
hiccupped at the bare recollection of the thing, and says he: "But we
can no longer say that the bloom is on the rye; for this unnatural war
has killed the agriculture of Kentucky and broken many of her bottles.
O Kentucky! Kentucky! how thirsty I am!"

After this speech, I could no longer profane the glory of God's
beautiful picture by talking about it to a chap who could see nothing
in a landscape but rye fields. And yet it is but natural for any
Conservative chap to talk thus, after all; for I have found it to be a
peculiarity of nearly all our fellow-beings, that Old Rye is foreve