note, my boy, that the architectural animal in question
has greatly improved of late upon a diet of condemned straw hats, and
now trots an hour in sixty minutes with the greatest ease of manner. An
occasional cough but adds to the melancholy interest of his funereal
cast of countenance; and as his head grows more and more vivid in its
resemblance to an infant's coffin, his whole effect deepens in its
churchliness and sepulchral solemnity.

As I neared the national head-quarters, the Mackerel Surgeon-General
saluted me, and I observed that he kept his glance dreamily fixed upon
the Gothic Pegasus.

"As I gaze upon that bony fabric," says he, biting a piece of calamus
in soft professional abstraction,--"as I gaze upon that fleet skeleton
you bestride, I cannot help thinking that Rule Britannia is frequently
right in speaking of a horse as an 'oss; though she may use a
superfluous 's' in the word. You see," says the surgeon, pausing to
take a gray powder, and to try his lancet on his left thumb-nail,--"you
see, the classical term '_os_' signifies bone; and as bone is the
prevailing aspect of your present charger, he might be termed an
'_'os_' without violence to the lingual proprieties."

I have always suspected this surgeon, my boy, of being an accursed
secessionist in disguise, and now I feel confident that he would not
hesitate, if opportunity offered, to carry his fiendish affection for
the well-known Southern Confederacy to the extent of actually differing
with me upon some point in conversation. In such times as these, my
boy, there can be no middle ground for a man; he must either be heart
and soul with his country's murderous foes, or ready to agree entirely
with me in anything I may say or think. God save the Republic!

Upon arriving at a locality, which I refrain from naming, lest I should
thereby betray my beloved country or make a mistake in spelling, I
found the venerable and spectacled veterans of the thrice-valorous
Mackerel Brigade just returned from a spirited pursuit of certain
regiments of disreputable Confederacies who were stealing farms on the
outskirts of Paris. These Confederacies had even penetrated into
storied Accomac, and removed everything they found upon the farms there
except the mortgages. Hence the demand upon the aged and unconquerable
Mackerel Brigade for an immediate walk in that direction, and there
they had gone by the most circuitous and profoundly strategical route
afforded by t