For some weeks past, my boy, insanity has been frightfully upon the increase in the ranks of the unconquerable Mackerel Brigade. Many Mackerels have even gone raving at times, persisting in the vague and incoherent exclamation that they "_Couldn't See It_." There was some hope that this terrible mental aberration might be stayed, if the superannuated _corps_ were supplied with spectacles; but the relief thus given was only temporary; and finally, when one of the poor maniac chaps went so far as to yell, that, even by the aid of his spectacles, he couldn't see what was the use of butting against the Blue Ridge all the time, it was deemed proper to call in the National Insanitary Committee. Captain Samyule Sa-mith, whose duty it was to draw the Brigade up in two lines--the sane chaps on one side of the fence, and the insane on the other--hastened back to Accomac to finish a game of "Old Sledge," on which four drinks were distinctly pending, and left the aged Committee to perform its task at leisure. In anticipation of this sad ceremony, my boy, I had sent my architectural steed, the gothic Pegasus, down to Accomac, and thither I went on Tuesday morning, to amble totteringly from thence to the scene of Insanitary proceedings. The Committee had just commenced work upon its line of chaps, and was examining the patients one by one. The first invalid, Lively Mike, was born in the Sixth Ward, and weighed ninety-two pounds. He was a poor, slouching chap, my boy, resembling poverty's Ruin, two-thirds covered by an ivy vine of rags. His angular countenance was rich with unwashings, save a clean irregular circle just around his ugly mouth. I asked how it happened that this one part of his face was clean, when all the rest was dirty; and they told me, my boy, that it was the place where his poor old mother had kissed him at parting. Lively Mike's first symptom of his dreadful malady was a feeling of overwhelming weariness, as though he had been for a long time in one spot doing nothing. The feeling deepened into sullen, dangerous madness, until it was finally unsafe to let him go at large, as he had several times attempted to shoot scouting Confederacies. The next hopeless patient was Big-nose Jake. Born at the commencement of his career in the Sixth Ward, and weighing ninety-four pounds without his knapsack, Big-nose had always enjoyed good health, with the exception of starvation; but was in the habit of muttering to himself that Strategy was a great humbug, and he'd rather die at home in his bunk in the engine-house than in a swamp, without a single fire in six months. His only way of keeping warm was by occasionally huddling up to a Confederate picket, and receiving _his_ fire.