ved his
iron-clad monster to be fully qualified for actual service. Everything
is now ready for the anticipated conquest of Duck Lake."

I give you the above in quotation marks, my boy, because it is the
official report as it appears in all the reliable morning journals, and
clearly and satisfactorily explains everything. The first of April is
close at hand.

Yours, fortuitously,

ORPHEUS C. KERR.

LETTER XC.

GIVING A DEEP INSIGHT OF WOMAN'S NATURE; PRESENTING A POWERFUL POEM
OF THE HEART BY ONE OF THE INTELLECTUAL FEMALES OF AMERICA; AND
REPORTING THE SIGNAL DISCOMFITURE OF MR. P. GREENE.

WASHINGTON, D.C., April 5th, 1863.

Woman's heart, my boy, in its days of youthful immaturity and vegetable
development, may be felicitously likened unto a delicate cabbage, with
an invisible worm feeding upon its sensitive petals. To the eye of the
ordinary and unfeeling observer, the cabbage is in perfect health, and
its intense greenness is thoughtlessly accepted as a sure indication of
an unravaged system. Man, proud man, with all his boasted human wisdom,
would smile incredulously, if told that the tender vegetable--the
magnified and nervous white rose, as it were--had beneath all its
seeming verdancy, an insatiable and remorseless worm gnawing at its
hidden core. Man, I say, would thus wallow in his miserable ignorance,
and persist in his disgusting blindness. But mark that dainty little
figure coming up the garden-walk, my boy. It does not walk erect, like
boastful Man, does not spit tobacco-juice like haughty Man; and as it
approaches nearer, we perceive that it is a hot-house Pig. Ay, my lord:
I say to you, in all your glory of human understanding and trifling
degree of snobbishness, it is a Pig. Yes, madam: I remark to you, in
your jewels, and laces, and absurd new bonnet,--it is only a Pig.
_very_ a Pig! O-O-ONLY a Pig! And why should we say "only" a Pig; as
though a Pig were so _very_ inferior to proud Man? We all accord to the
awful and unfathomable German Mind a preternatural gift of philosophy,
so far above the contemptibly-limited thing we call human understanding
that no man can ever understand a word of it; and how does that German
Mind express itself when it desires to describe the Vast, the
Extensive, and the Somewhat Large? Why, it simply observes "Das is von
'PIG' thing." And is not this unaffected remark sufficient, my boy, to
raise the wrongfully despised Pig to the dignity of an