time half our little party were killed we began to be all alive again. Fortunately, the rebels had no guns, except pistols, cutlasses, and pikes; and as we had plenty of guns and ammunition, we put them all to the sword. Not a soul of them escaped, except some that were drowned in an adjacent bog; and in a very short time nothing was to be heard but silence. Their uniforms were all different colors, but mostly green. After the action, we went to rummage a sort of camp which they had left behind them. All we found was a few pikes without heads, a parcel of empty bottles full of water, and a bundle of French commissions filled up with Irish names. Troops are now stationed all around the country, which exactly squares with my ideas. I have only time to add that I am in great haste. “Yours truly, ——. “P. S.—If you do not receive this, of course it must have miscarried: therefore I beg you will write and let me know.” Miss Edgeworth says, further, that “many bulls, reputed to be bred and born in Ireland, are of foreign extraction; and many more, supposed to be unrivalled in their kind, may be matched in all their capital points.” To prove this, she cites numerous examples of well-known bulls, with their foreign prototypes, not only English and Continental, but even Oriental and ancient. Among the parallels of familiar bulls to be found nearer our American home since the skillful defender of Erin’s naïveté wrote her Essay, one of the best is an economical method of erecting a new jail:— The following resolutions were passed by the Board of Councilmen in Canton, Mississippi:— 1. Resolved, by this Council, that we build a new Jail. 2. Resolved, that the new Jail be built out of the materials of the old Jail. 3. Resolved, that the old Jail be used until the new Jail is finished. It was a _Frenchman_ who, in making a classified catalogue of books, placed Miss Edgeworth’s Essay in the list of works on _Natural History_; and it was a _Scotchman_ who, having purchased a copy of it, pronounced her “a puir silly body, to write a book on bulls, and no ane word o’ horned cattle in it a’, forbye the bit beastie [the vignette] at the beginning.” Examples from the common walks of life and from periodical literature may readily be multiplied to show that these phraseological peculiarities are not to be exclusively attributed to Ireland. But if we adopt Coleridge’s definition, which is, that “a bull consists in a mental juxtaposition of incongruous ideas, with the sensation, but without the sense, of connection,” we shall find frequent instances of its occurrence among standard authors. Take the following blunders, for examples:— Adam, the goodliest man of men _since born His sons_—the fairest of _her daughters_, Eve. _Milton’s Paradise Lost._