This venerable ornament of our peerless naval service, to whom the eyes of the whole world are now directed, was born of one of his parents at an early period of his existence, and has since incurred the years temporarily elapsing between that epoch and the present auspicious occasion. The subject of our brief biography entered the navy when he was only fifty years old, as commander of the Mackerel iron-plated squadron on Duck Lake, where he became widely noted for success in fishing, as well as for his skill in eluding vessels running the blockade. At one time, indeed, he came very near capturing a Confederate ram, being only prevented by failing to find the key of the box containing his spectacles in time to reconnoiter the wily foe. Commodore Head's conversation concerning the speedy capture of Vicksburg, Charleston, Savannah and Mobile, is instructive to all minds, and his promotion is an event calculated to prove that the war is about to begin in earnest. * * * * * Rear-Admirals, my boy, are an aristocratic institution; and their creation must serve to convince besotted Europe, that in making a naval distinction between rank and file, our discriminating Government knows how to compromise matters by bestowing a new rank upon an old file. It was on Wednesday that my architectural steed, the Gothic Pegasus, renewed his usual weekly journey to desolated Accomac, cheerfully conveying me thither at a speed that did not keep the same roadside house in view more than half an hour at a time. Having hitched the funereal stallion to a copy of Senator Sumner's recent Faneuil Hall speech, believing that document sufficiently heavy to hold him, I gave him a discarded straw-hat of mine for his dinner, and strolled into the Mackerel camp. To the everlasting disgrace of our rulers be it said, my boy, I found the devoted Mackerel Brigade progressing toward deep suffering at a rate which made me thank Heaven that I owned no chickens within sight of the harrowing scene. Being thoughtlessly supplied with three days' rations at a time, these neglected martyrs incur all the perils of suffocation and cruel nightmare by doing nothing on the first day but eat from morning till night, what is left over at midnight being used to pelt each other with. Then for two whole days these gallant men who are fighting our battles find famine staring them in the face, and I actually heard one emaciated Mackerel chap offering a whole week's pay to another Mackerel chap for a Confederate cracker which he had picked up in a field, wishing to consign that cracker to his friends at home as a sample of the unnatural food with which an ungrateful Republic feeds its faithful soldiers. I even found many Mackerels without knapsacks and blankets, which they had lost in adventures at "Old Sledge"; and there was that in the countenances of others which sured me that their poor faces had not been washed since the commencement of the war!