I tell you what, my boy, if Abe pays a post-office for every story of his childhood that's told, the mail department of this glorious nation will be so large that a letter smaller than a two-story house would get lost in it. * * * * * Of all the vile and damning deeds that ever rendered a city eternally infamous, my boy--of all the infernal sins of dark-browed treachery that ever made open-faced treason seem holy, the crime of Baltimore is the blackest and worst. All that April day we were waiting with bated breath and beating hearts for the devoted men who had pledged their lives to their country at the first call of the President, and were known to be marching to the defence of the nation's capital. That night was one of terror: at any moment the hosts of the rebels might pour upon the city from the mountains of guilty Virginia, and grasp the very throat of the Republic. And with the first dim light of morning came the news that our soldiers had been basely beset in the streets of Baltimore, and ruthlessly shot down by a treacherous mob! Those whom they had trusted as brothers, my boy--whose country they were marching to defend with their lives--assassinating them in cold blood! I was sitting in my room at Willard's, when a serious chap from New Haven, who had just paused long enough at the door to send a waiter for the same that he had yesterday, came rushing into the apartment with a long, fluttering paper in his hand. "Listen to this," says he, in wild agitation, and read: BALTIMORE. Midnight shadows, dark, appalling, round the Capitol were falling, And its dome and pillars glimmered spectral from Potomac's shore; All the great had gone to slumber, and of all the busy number That had moved the State by day within its walls, as erst before, None there were but dreamed of heroes thither sent ere day was o'er-- Thither sent through BALTIMORE. But within a chamber solemn, barred aloft with many a column, And with windows tow'rd Mount Vernon, windows tow'rd Potomac's shore, Sat a figure, stern and awful; Chief, but not the Chieftain lawful Of the land whose grateful millions Washington's great name adore-- Sat the form--a shade majestic of a Chieftain gone before, Thine to honor, BALTIMORE! There he sat in silence, gazing, by a single planet's blazing, At a map outspread before him wide upon the marble floor; And if 'twere for mortal proving that those reverend lips were moving, While the eyes were closely scanning one mapped city o'er and o'er-- While he saw but one great city on that map upon the floor-- They were whispering--"BALTIMORE."