Yours, radiantly, ORPHEUS C. KERR. LETTER LXXVI. REFERRING TO THE MOSQUITO AS A TEST OF HUMAN NATURE, EXPLAINING THE LONG HALT OF THE MACKEREL BRIGADE, AND NOTING THE COURT OF INQUIRY ON CAPTAIN VILLIAM BROWN. WASHINGTON, D. C., October 26th, 1862. Early this morning, my boy, I sauntered across the Long Bridge and took my seat upon the topmost rail of a fence enclosing a trampled meadow. There I sat, like Marius, my boy, contemplating the architectural ruin embodied in my Gothic steed, Pegasus, and ever and anon whistling abstractedly to my frescoed dog, Bologna. By the gods! I really love these dumb friends of mine. The speculative eye of the world sees in poor Pegasus nothing more than an architectural dream--the church architecture of the future--and, I must confess, my boy, that the Gothic charger _does_ look something like a skeleton chapel at a distance; it sees in Bologna only a mongrel cur, whose taste for the calves of human legs is an epicurean outrage on walking society. But for me, my boy, there is a human pathos in the patient fidelity of these zoological curiosities which appeals to my best manhood. I have had a hard and thankless life of it; my experience with the knowing political chaps of the Sixth Ward was enough to grind everything like human tenderness out of my nature, and make me turn into an arrogant and contemptuous misanthrope; but there are times when the cold nose of Pegasus against my cheek, or a wag from that speaking tail of Bologna--which curls up behind him like a note of interrogation, to ask how his master feels--will give me such a sensation of wishing to protect and be kind to the Helpless, that I feel myself a better man for the practical Christianity of such humble society. There is my mosquito, the youthful Humboldt, too! He came to me one night, about two years ago, my boy, practising much profound strategy to capture my nose; and when I foiled him by a free use of both arms of the service, the unterrified and humming manner in which he changed the base of his operations and came on again, excited my admiration and respect. Catching him in a little net cage made from the musquito bars of my bed, I kept him safely by me, and now use him as a test of human nature. In God's providence, each minute created thing has its appointed use, my boy, and depend upon it, the use of the musquito is to test human nature.