without members who wear your
own style of costume.

Yours, carefully,

ORPHEUS C. KERR.

LETTER CIX.

WHICH ENDETH THE THIRD VOLUME OF THIS INEXPRESSIBLY VERACIOUS
HISTORY OF THE WAR; AND SHOWETH HOW A GREAT REPUBLIC FINALLY
OVERCAME ITS SURPASSINGLY MENDACIOUS FOES, AND HOW IT EVINCES ITS
UNSPEAKABLE GRATITUDE TO PROVIDENCE FOR SUCH A VICTORY.

WASHINGTON, D.C., April 11th, 1865.

Look, my boy, upon the east wall of my luxurious presence-chamber, and
mark how I have maliciously pasted thereon a map of besotted Europe;
with all its capitals, rivers, mountains, and inland puddles laid down
with an accuracy and multitudinosity to forever enlighten and utterly
confound every sniffing little schoolboy-geographer in the land. What a
shapeless chunk of inferior dirt is Europe! How like a minute and
feeble skiptail does it appear, when compared with our own gigantic
straddlebug of a country! Yet has the skiptail ventured to interfere
offensively in the private affairs of the straddlebug; and the
interference, and the private affairs, and the possible upshot of the
whole matter, remind me forcibly of a spirited little event which once
occurred in the Sixth Ward.

The male and female Michael O'Korrigan, my boy, occupied a spacious
apartment on the fine, airy, eighth floor of the sumptuous Maison
Mulligan in that celebrated Ward, and for several years the course of
their true love ran so smoothly that it became hopelessly insipid and
exasperating to all the old maids for blocks around. Nothing was ever
equal to the peaceful unity of the male and female O'Korrigan; and did
Michael find it necessary, in the course of some friendly discussion
with a neighbor on the stairs, to call for a hatchet till he broke the
ugly nose of the spalpeen, it was the wife of his bosom that handed him
his own bit of a stick, and joined in the argument herself with a poker
for a referee. But nothing's perfect in this world except the wisdom of
owls and Congressmen, and Mrs. O'Korrigan's military virtues and
wholesome command of her husband had the slight drawback of a
constitutional taste for poteen. Michael expostulated with her by the
hair, and remonstrated with her by the shoulders, and plead with her
over the head; but all to no purpose; and he was greatly assisted and
comforted by a bit of a preacher named Father O'Tod, who took care of
everybody's virtue except his own. It was Father O'Tod that sat down
beside h