perfect and astounding perversion of meaning on record!

LETTER CVIII.

NARRATING THE UTTERLY UNPARALLELED CONQUEST OF PARIS BY THE
VENERABLE MACKEREL BRIGADE, AFTER THREE DAYS' INCONCEIVABLE
STRATEGY; IN FACT, A BATTLE-REPORT AFTER THE MANNER OF ALL OUR
EXCITED MORNING JOURNALS; UPON PERUSING WHICH, EACH READER IS
EXPECTED TO WRAP HIMSELF UP IN THE AMERICAN FLAG AND SHAKE HIS FIST
AT COMBINED EUROPE.

WASHINGTON, D.C., April 4th, 1865.

To loud huzzas our flag ascends, as climbs a flame the dizzy mast,
while all its burning glory bends from where the planets seal it fast;
and, pliant to the chainless winds, a blazing sheet, a lurid scroll,
the Compact of the Stars it binds in fire that warms a nation's soul!

All of which, my boy, is the poetry of that banner whose union of a
starry section of evening with the hues of dawn and sunset makes it a
very good marriage-certificate of the wedding of old Mr. Day and the
Widow Night. (Let us hope that Mr. Day will never be without a sun.)

And do you ask me wherefore I thus burst into red-hot song?--wherefore
I inflict further verses upon a flag already washed almost to pieces in
a freshet of poet's tears?--wherefore I jingle rhymes of Bostonian
severity at the commencement of an epistle whose readers may not all be
Emersons?

Know, then, my boy, that the chant is to celebrate the conquest of the
ancient City of Paris, which, for many years past, has actually waxed
prosperous against Mackerel strategy, but now rests a prize beneath
that glorious bunting which we all like to see our poor relations die
for: beneath that ensign of freedom for which every man of us would
willingly sacrifice his life, did he not feel that his first great duty
was to his helpless family, who like to have him stay at home and take
them to the opera.

O my country!--sublime in thy wounds, chivalrous in thy triumph, more
than royal in the kingless magnificence of thine undaunted
power;--forget not the patriots who have stayed at home on account of
their families; for surely such a disinterested and general
demonstration of domestic virtue seems to indicate that our police
force is uselessly large.

Let me not, however, waste time in national boasting, while the
crowning result of consummate Mackerel strategy demands of me that
narrating exercise of the pen without which even brigadiers might fail
to receive public credit for deeds after the manner of Napoleon.