r her work, whether her lord
would advise her to go out as a Florence Nightingale, or turn teacher
of intelligent contrabands.

Night came, and the Pequogian returned from his grocery store, and
silently took a seat before the fire in the dining-room. The little
woman looked up at him from the ottoman on which she was cosily
sitting, and says she:

"Well, dear?"

Slowly and solemnly did that Pequog husband draw off one boot.
Deliberately did he take off a stocking and hold it aloft.

"Martha Jane!" says he, gravely, "'tis a sock your eyes behold, and
there is a hole in the heel thereof. You are a wife; duty calls you to
mend your husband's stockings; and _this_--THIS--is Woman's Part in the
Wore!"

Let us draw a veil, my boy, over the heart-rending scene that followed;
only hinting that hartshorn and burnt feathers are believed to be
useful on such occasions, and produce an odor at once wholesome and
exasperating.

Yours, sympathetically,

ORPHEUS C. KERR.

LETTER CVI.

WHEREIN WILL BE FOUND CERTAIN PROFOUND REMARKS UPON THE VARIATIONS
OF GOLD, ETC., AND A WHOLESOME LITTLE TALE ILLUSTRATIVE OF THAT
FAMOUS POPULAR ABSTRACTION, THE SOUTHERN TREASURY NOTE.

WASHINGTON, D.C., March 22, 1865.

The venerable Aaron, my boy, was the first gold speculator mentioned in
history, and it exhausted all the statesmanship of Moses to break up
the unseemly speculation, and bring Hebrew dry goods and provisions
down to decent prices. Were Aaron alive now, how he would mourn to find
his auriferous calf going down at the rate of ten per cent. a day,
while the Moses of the White House reduced that animal more and more to
the standard of very common mutton!

Alas, my boy, what madness is this which causes men to forget honor,
country, ay, even dinner itself, for ungrateful gold! Like all writers
whose object is the moral improvement of their kind, I have a wholesome
contempt of gold. What is it? A vulgar-looking yellow metal, with a
disagreeable smell. It is filthy lucre. It is dross. It is also 156.

Not many months ago I knew a high-toned chap of much neck and chin, who
made five hundred thousand dollars by supplying our national troops
with canned peaches, and was so inflated with his good luck in the
cholera-morbus line, that he actually began to think that his canned
peaches had something to do with the successes in the field of our
excellent military organization. Being thus elevated, this
finely-