“My dear Sir:” he is made to write in response to an imaginary request for a contribution, “to be obliged to penetrate with the pump-buckets of necessity, prompted by the piston of a fifty-dollar compensation, with a publisher as the pump-handle, in search of a poem, is, of itself, annoying enough. To draw one up with the rope and bucket of gratuity, is a labor which qualifies one for a long residence in fatiguedom. Your letter found me fagging away over my work-desk--chasing a brilliant idea in and out of the myriads of convolutions of my brain. All the while that I was aping Prometheus (the window being half-opened), I could sniff the delightful odors of a rose which a fair neighbor will insist on keeping,” etc., etc. The requested poem is annexed--a scriptural poem, “The Fishwoman’s Son:”-- “Night on the market. Through the colonnade Of red-brick pillars not a sound was heard, Save of some whistling urchin as he strode With stamping footfalls, listening to the noise Which wore his shoe-soles and the hearer’s patience; Or the low mutter of the drunken man, As his wild song, proclaiming fix’d resolve Not to go home till morning, sank to low And nearly inarticulate murmurs.” The fishwoman’s son sings a song, whose first stanza runs:-- “I will not go, Like a whipt dog, unto the public school, To wear the cap and tokens of a fool, While Mexico Invites me on to glory and to fame,-- Or a cracked crown, which after all’s the same.”