an family, need not deter your insidious
self from answering in the affirmative, when I ask you, calmly, if it
does not seem that a military organization of such intellect, _must_ be
engaged in some unspeakably profound scheme of victory, even though to
the uneducated eye it may present somewhat the aspect of a muddy old
gentleman with his head against a stone-wall?

And this business of showing the possible identity of apparent
dead-pause with actual velocity, reminds me of a chap I once knew in
the Sixth Ward. He was a cast-iron chap, my boy, whose most powerful
conception of enterprise in trade was vividly associated with the duty
of being forever in his shirt-sleeves; and he kept a hardware shop at
which the economical women of America could get such bargains in
flat-irons and door-plates, as were a temptation to marry none but the
most impoverished young men.

Many customers had this very practical hardware chap, and one of them
was an aged file in a broad-brimmed hat, blue spectacles, and a silk
umbrella, who had about him that air of Philadelphia which at once
suggests an equal admixture of chronic slumber and profundity. Being a
widower and a happy man, it was the daily custom of this aged file to
spend several hours of intellectual refreshment in the hardware shop,
smiling benignantly upon the ancient maidens who came thither to buy
curling-tongs, and enlivening the soul of the cast-iron chap with fine,
laborious treatises on the general idiocy of popular perception.

"I tell you, my child," this aged file would remark, polishing his
spectacles with a red silk handkerchief,--"I tell you, the popular
perception wants nicety; wants delicacy; wants capacity to distinguish
between the noisy, bustling style of operation by which it loves to be
deceived,--_Populus vult decipi_,--and the silent, almost imperceptible
agencies through which all really great results are accomplished."

Having heard this chaste sentiment repeated daily for about three
years, my boy, the very practical hardware chap began to find his
nature growing embittered, and resolved to do something desperate. So,
one morning, after listening quietly to the essay of the aged file, and
refusing to tell a small boot-blacking child of six years old the
lowest price for one of Jones's Patent steam-ploughs, this cast-iron
chap suddenly removed his hands from around an object on the counter,
which he had, apparently, been attempting to conceal, and reve