I took another branch road here, and we snailed along to another town, composed of a wood-pile. "What place is this?" says I to my fellow-traveller, the brakeman. "It's Abednego Junction, the capital of Laura Matilda County," says he, sounding my quarter on his seal ring to make sure that it was genuine. Now, as London, the city I was going to, happened to be the capital of Anna Maria County, my boy, I made up my mind that the sacred soil had as many metropolises as railways. "Virginia," says a modern Southern giant of intellect, "is one grand embodied poem." I believe him, my boy; for, like a poem, Virginia appears to have a capital at the commencement of every line. Reaching London, and brushing past a crowd of our true friends the contrabands, whose cries of anguish upon hearing that I had brought them no plum-pudding, were truly harrowing, I pushed forward to the new Union paper, the London Times, with whose editor I had business. Just as I entered the office, my boy, there rushed out in great rage an exasperated southern Union man. Having no gun about the house to pick off our pickets as they came into town, he borrowed a barber's pole and stuck it out of the window, proclaimed himself an oppressed Unionist, had a meeting of his family to elect him to the United States Congress from Anna Maria County, and made a thrilling Union address to two contrabands from his back-stoop. He wound up this great speech, my boy, by saying: "Young men, it is your duty to fight for the Union, which has caused us all so many tears. If any young man's wife would fain dissuade him, let him say to her, in the language of the poet, "'I could not love thee, dear, so much, Loved I not Honor more!'" This touching peroration was sent in manuscript to the London Times, and this is the way it appeared in that intellectual American journal: "Young hen, it is your duty to fight for the Onion, which has caused us all so many tears. If any young man's wife would fain dissuade him, let him say to her, in the language of the poet: "'I could not love thee, dear, so much, Loved I not Hannah More.'" When the southern Union man read this twistification, he put his paper where his wife couldn't see it (she being a very jealous woman), and went out to cowhide the editor. He cowhided him, by frantically placing the cowhide in the editor's hands, and then running his back repeatedly against the weapon. Typographical errors have a unique effect in reports of killed and wounded, my boy; but they knock the Promethean blaze out of eloquence.