"Thunder!" says he to Captain Bob Shorty, stirring the Oath in his tumbler with a tooth-brush--"the way Little Mac is devoting himself to the military squelching of this here unnatural rebellion, is actually outraging his physical nature. He reviews his staff twice a day, goes over the river every five minutes, studies international law six hours before dinner, takes soundings of the mud every time the dew falls, and takes so little sleep, that there's two inches of dust on one of his eye-balls. Would you believe it," says the General, placing the tumbler over his nose to keep off a fly, "his devotion is such that his hair is turning gray and will probably dye!" Captain Bob Shorty whistled. I do not mean to say that he intended to be musically satirical, my boy; but if I should hear such a canary-bird remark after _I'd_ told a story, somebody would go home with his eyes done up in rainbows. "Permit _me_," says Captain Bob Shorty, hurling what remained of the Oath into the aperture under his moustache. "You convince me that Little Mac's devotion is extraordinary," continued Captain Bob Shorty, dreamily; "but he don't come up to a chap I once knew, which was a editor. Talk about devotion! and outraging nature!" says Captain Bob Shorty, spitting with exquisite accuracy into the eyes of the regimental cat, "why, that ere editor threw body, soul, and breeches into his work; and so completely identified himself with a free and enlightened press, that his first child was a _newsboy_." The General of the Mackerel Brigade arose from his seat, my boy, wound up his watch, brushed off his boots, threw the cat out of the window, and then says he: "Robert, name of Shorty, did you ever read in the Bible about Ananias, who was struck dead for telling a telegraph?" "I heard about him," says Captain Bob Shorty, "when I was but a innocent lamb, and wore my mother's slipper on my back about as often as she wore it on her foot." "Well," says the general, with the air of a thoughtful parent, "it's my opinion that if you'd been Ananias, the same streak of lightning would have buried you and paid the sexton." From this logical and vivid conversation, my boy, you will understand that our leading military men have perfect faith in the genius of McClellan, and believe that he is equal to fifty yards of the Star-Spangled Banner. His great anaconda has gathered itself in a circle around the doomed rabbit of rebellion, and if the rabbit swells he's a goner. This great anaconda, my boy, may remind hellish readers of the anaconda once seen by a chap of my acquaintance living in the Sixth Ward. This chap, my boy, came tearing into a place where they kept the Oath on tap, and says he: "I've just seen an anaconda down Broadway." "Anna who?" says a red-nosed Alderman, dipping his finger into the water on the stove to see if it was warm enough to melt some brandy-refined sugar. "I said Anaconda, you ignorant cuss," says the chap.