The first question to ask ourselves is this: Was General Grant in the habit of calling in a thinker whenever he wanted anything done in that line? He says distinctly in his letter that he was not. He could not do it. It was impracticable. Supposing in the crash of battle and in the moment of victory your short, hard thinker has his head shot off and it falls in a pumpkin orchard, where there is naturally more or less delay in identifying it, what can you do? Suppose that you were the president of the United States, and your think-supply got snow-bound at Newark in a vestibule train, and congress were waiting for you to veto a bill. You could not think the thought in the first place, and even if you could you would hate to send it to congress until it was properly clothed. I am told that nothing shocks congress so much as the sudden appearance "in its midst" of a naked and new-born thought. But General Dado has the advantage over General Grant in one respect. He can not be injured much. Otherwise the case is against him. But the matter will be watched with careful interest by literary people generally, and especially by soldiers and magazines with a war history. It is a warning to those who think their thoughts in unguarded moments while stenographers may be near to take them down and claim them afterwards. It is also a warning to people who thoughtlessly expose naked facts in the presence of word-painters and thought-clothiers, who may decorate and outfit these children of the brain and charge it up to the estate. Is the time coming when general dealers in apparel and gents' furnishing goods for the use of bare facts, and men who attend to the costuming, draping, and swaddling of nude ideas, will compete so closely with each other that, before a think has its eyes fairly open, one of these gentlemen will slap a suit of clothes on it, with a Waterbury watch in each pocket, and have a boy half way to the office with the bill? A RUBBER ESOPHAGUS. XXVI Puget Sound is undoubtedly one of the most beautiful sheets of water in the world. Its bosom is as unruffled as that of an angel who is opposed to ruffles on general principles. To say that real estate was once active at certain places on its shores is just simply about as powerful as the remark made by the frontiersman who came home from his haying one afternoon and found that the Indians had burned up his buildings, massacred his wife, driven off his milch cows and killed his children. He looked over the bloody scene and then said to himself with great feeling; "This, it seems to me, is perfectly ridiculous."