The Orpheus C. Kerr Papers, Series 1Newell, R. H. (Robert Henry)
History
The Orpheus C. Kerr Papers, Series 1
Newell, R. H. (Robert Henry)
United States -- History -- Civil War, 1861-1865 -- Fiction
The expiring soldier then laid down his gun, hung his cap and overcoat
on a branch of a tree, and blew his nose.
He then died.
And there I stood, my boy, on that lonely beat, looking down on that
fallen type of manhood, and thinking how singular it was he had
forgotten to give me back my quarter.
As I looked upon him there, I could not help thinking to myself, "here
is another whose home shall know him no more."
The sight and the thought so affected me, that I was obliged to turn my
back on the corpse and walk a little way from it. When I returned to
the spot, the body was gone! Had it gone to Heaven? Perhaps so, my
boy--perhaps so; but I hav'n't seen my quarter since.
Your own picket,
ORPHEUS C. KERR.
LETTER XIX.
NOTICING THE ARRIVAL OF A SOLID BOSTON MAN WITH AN UNPRECEDENTED
LITERARY PRIZE, AND SHOWING HOW VILLIAM BROWN WAS TRIUMPHANTLY
PROMOTED.
WASHINGTON, D.C., November --, 1861.
Having just made a luscious breakfast, my boy, on some biscuit
discovered amid the ruins of Herculaneum, and purchased expressly for
the grand army by a contracting agent for the Government, I take a sip
of coffee from the very boot in which it was warmed, and hasten to pen
my dispatch.
On Wednesday morning, my boy, the army here was reënforced by a very
fat man from Boston, who said he'd been used to Beacon street all the
days of his life, and considered the State House somewhat superior to
St. Peter's at Rome. He was a very fat man, my boy: eight hands high,
six and a half hands thick, and his head looked like a full moon
sinking in the west at five o'clock in the morning. He said he joined
the army to fight for the Union, and cure his asthma, and Colonel
Wobert Wobinson thoughtfully remarked, that he thought he could grease
a pretty long bayonet without feeling uncomfortable. This fat man, my
boy, was leaning down to clean his boots just outside of a tent, when
the General of the Mackerel Brigade happened to come along, and got a
back view of him.
"Thunder!" says the general, stopping short; "who's been sending
artillery into camp?"
"There's no artillery here, my boy," says I.
"Well," says he, "then what's the gun-carriage doing here?"
I explained to him that what he took for a gun-carriage was a fat
patriot blacking his boots; and he said that he be dam.
Soon after the arrival of this solid Boston man, my boy, I noticed that
he always carried about with him, suspended by a strap under his right
arm, something carefully wrapped in oilskin. He was sitting with me in
my room at Willard's the other evening, and says I to him:
"What's that you hug so much, my Plymouth Rocker?"
He nervously clutched his treasure, and says he:
"It's an unpublished poem of the Honorable Edward, which I found in a
very old album in Beacon street. It's an immortal and unpublished
poem," says he, fondly taking a roll of manuscript from the oilskin
wrapper,--"by the greatest and most silent statesman of the age.
You'll recognize the style at once.--Listen--
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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