I must say, my boy, that I at first thought the Confederacy was not hit at all, inasmuch as he only scratched one of his legs and squinted along his gun; but Villiam soon showed me how exquisitely accurate the sharpshooter's aim had been. "The bullet struck him," says Villiam, confidently, "and would have reached his heart, but for the Bible given him by his mother when he left home, which arrested its fatal progress. Let us hope," says Villiam, seriously, "that he will henceforth search the Scriptures, and be a dutiful son." I felt the tears spring to my eyes, for I once had a mother myself. I couldn't help it, my boy--I couldn't help it. The second shot of the unerring rifleman was aimed at a hapless contraband, who had been sent out to the end of a gun by the enemy, to see that the ball did not roll out before the gunner had time to pull the trigger. Crack! went the deadly weapon of the sharpshooter, and down went the unhappy African--to his dinner. "Ah!" says Villiam, skeptically, "do you think you hit him, Ajack?" "Truelie, stranger," responded the unmoved marksman, sententiously. "He will die at twenty minutes past three this afternoon." Sick of this dreadful slaughter, my boy, I turned from the spot with Villiam, and presently overtook the general of the Mackerel Brigade, who was seated on a fence by the roadside, trying to knock the cork out of a bottle with a piece of rock. We saluted, and went on to the camp. Sharpshooters, my boy, are a source of much pain to hostile gunners, and if one of them should happen to put a bullet through the head of navigation, it would certainly cause the tide to fall. Yours, take-aimiably, ORPHEUS C. KERR. LETTER XLIII. CONCERNING MARTIAL LITERATURE: INTRODUCING A DIDACTIC POEM BY THE "ARKANSAW TRACT SOCIETY," AND A BIOGRAPHY OF GARIBALDI FOR THE SOLDIER. WASHINGTON, D.C., May 7th, 1862. Southern religious literature, my boy, is admirably calculated to improve the morals of race-courses, and render dog-fights the instruments of wholesome spiritual culture. On the person of a high-minded Southern Confederacy captured the other day by the Mackerel pickets, I found a moral work which had been issued by the Arkansaw Tract Society for the diffusion of religious thoughts in the camp, and was much improved by reading it. The pure-minded Arkansaw chap who got it up, my boy, remarked in pallid print, that every man "should extract a wholesome moral from everything whatsomedever," and then went on to say that there was an excellent moral in the beautiful Arkansaw nursery tale of THE BEWITCHED TARRIER. Sam Johnson was a cullud man, Who lived down in Judee; He owned a rat tan tarrier That stood 'bout one foot three; And the way that critter chawed up rats Was gorjus for to see.