models, which protruded from the window as usual.

Pretty soon a Western Congressman came along, and says the contractor
to him:

"Can you tell me, sir, whether those models of gunboats up there are on
exhibition?"

"Gunboats!" says the Western chap, looking. "Do you take those things
for gunboats?"

"Of course," says the contractor.

"Why, you fool!" says the Congressman, "those are the Secretary's
boots. The Secretary always sits with his feet out of the window when
he is at home, and those are the ends of his boots!"

Without another word, my boy, the General and the contractor turned
gloomily from the spot, convinced that they had witnessed the most
terrific feet of the campaign.

Yours, merrily,

ORPHEUS C. KERR.

LETTER C.

GIVING DIVERS INSTANCES OF STRANGELY-MISTAKEN IDENTITY; AND
REVEALING A WISE METHOD OF SAVING THE COUNTRY FROM BANKRUPTCY.

WASHINGTON, D.C., March 5th, 1864.

This gray-headed pen of mine, my boy,--which is mightier than the
sword, inasmuch as it can, itself, "draw" the sword when it chooses,
quite as accurately as any pencil-vanian,--has run the blockade
recently imposed upon it, and once more gambols nervously down the
lines of contemporaneous military history. When first I heard that
aphorism of the elegant and ghostly Bulwer, by which the sober sceptre
of the scribe is magnified above the fancy-dress weapon of the hero, I
took it to be like any other high-sounding sentiment of the stage,
whereby the poor but virtuous editor was nobly and improvingly
encouraged to believe himself rather more powerful in this universe
than all its great captains put together. Being a child of the pen
myself, I felt benignantly inflated by the venerable "Richelieu's"
excellent remark, and looked with much generous pity upon a crushed
young army officer in the box next to mine; but, at the same time, I
remember that it reminded me of the exceedingly moral popular delusion
making starving virtue a much pleasanter and more admirable thing to
possess than a king's crown; and I also remember how it thereupon
dawned upon me, that the pen was possibly mightier than the sword only
in the far-removed sense of Might being Write. Since I have lived in
Washington, however, I have learned, my boy, that the sentiment in
question is capable of demonstration as a very plain fact; seeing, as I
do, that off-hand strokes of the pen can in a very few minutes promote
into Major Generals and Brigad