As Age advances, ails and aches attend, Backs builded broadest burdensomely bend; Cuttingly cruel comes consuming Care, Dealing delusions, drivelry, despair. Empty endeavor enervately ends, Fancy forlornly feigns forgotten friends; Gout, grimly griping, gluttonously great, Hasten's humanity's hard-hearted hate. Intentions imbecile invent ideas Justly jocunding jolly jokers' jeers: Knowledge--keen kingdom knurlyably known-- Lingers, lamenting life's long lasting loan, Mammonly mumming, magnifying motes, Nurtures numb Nature's narrowest nursery notes, Opens old age's odious offering out-- Peevish punctilio, parrot-pining pout. Qualmishly querrying, quarrelsomely quaint, Rousing rife ridicules' repealed restraint; Speaking soft silliness--such shallow show That tottering toysters, tickled, titter too. Useless, ungainly unbeloved, unblest, Virtue's vague visor, vice's veiling vest, Wheezingly whimpering, wanting wisdom, wit, Xistence, Xigent, Xclaims--Xit! Youths, you're yelept youth's youngest; yet you'll Zestless zig-zaggers zanyable zealed. I exhibited that pleasing little poem to a Mackerel chap, who stuttered, my boy; and he came so near going into apoplexy through his endeavors to read it, that I was obliged to make a joke, in order that he might smile, relax, and recover. And now let your mind fly, like a wearied dove, to the celebrated Arcadian scenes of festive Accomac, where the Mackerel Brigade continues to reconnoitre in force, and awaits the death of the Confederacy by old age. Men, my boy, who entered this strategic war in the full bloom of youth, now go with stooping shoulders and tottering gait when they have a barrel of flour to carry, and the bloom has departed from every part of them save the extreme tip of that handle of the human countenance which first meets the edge of an open door in the dark. Even the Mackerel brass-band begins to grow feeble, often making pitiable attempts to execute stirring strains on his night key bugle, as though unconscious that by long disuse in his pocket it had become clogged with bread and cheese. There is, on the Southern border of Accomac, my boy, a solitary house, containing furniture and the necessaries of life, which the Conic Section of the Mackerel Brigade had been ordered to guard. It stands immediately on the verdant banks of Awlkwyet River, where that stream must be at least ten inches deep; and as the first regular bridge is ten miles below it, of course the Conic Section, to guard the house, was placed at the end of that bridge--it being a principle of national strategy never to recognize any Confederate raid not made across a regular bridge.