WASHINGTON, D. C., July 19th, 1862. Permit me to return thanks through your mail, my boy, for a large feather fan recently consigned to my address by one of the admiring Women of America. It looks like a tail freshly plucked from a large-sized American eagle, and is decorated with a French-plate mirror in the centre and other French plates around the edges. The kind-hearted woman of America (who writes from Boston) says in her presentation note--"I admire to see a fan in the hands of the sterner sex; for it shows that the same hero-fist that grasps the sword has enough inherent gentleness to wave the cooling bauble. Such is life. The hand which falls like a hundred pounds of granite on the flinty eye of his ke-yuntery's foes has the softness of a blessing when it caresses the golden head of plastic childhood. Yours, gushingly, Zephyrina Percy." I find the "cooling bauble" very useful to brush the flies from my gothic steed Pegasus, my boy, and am a fanatic "to this extent, no more." And here is what another young woman of America says to me in a note: "My ma requests me to tell you that you ought to be ashamed of yourself, you hateful thing, for encouraging the vulgar people to be in favor of this nasty war, that is causing their superiors so much trouble, and has driven away the opera, and made enemies of those nice Southerners, with their beautiful big eyes and elegant swearing. Why don't you advocate a compromise, or a Habeas Corpus, or some other paper with names to it, and get Mr. Lincoln to stop the Constitution and order the war to be ended before there's any more assassinations and things? My pa was once a leather banker, and sold shoes for plantation servants, and made a great deal of money by it; but now he's a captain, or a surveyor, or some ridiculous thing, of the Home Guard, and may be massacred in cold blood the first time there's a battle in our neighborhood. My pa has to go to drill every night, and when he comes home in the morning he's so worn out with exhaustion that I've known him to lay right down in the hall and shed tears. My ma often says, that if Beauregard, or Palmerston, or any other foes should attack our house while pa is in that state, it would kill her dead. And I know it would make me so nervous that I should be a perfect fright for a week. My brother, Adolphus, has likewise joined the Home Guard, and has already had a bloody engagement with a Southerner named Tailor, who used to sell him clothes when the two sections were at peace. Adolphus says if it hadn't been for his double-quick, or some ridiculous military thing or other, he would have been made a prisoner. It makes me sick to see how much lowness there is about Adolphus since he joined the ridiculous army; he calls his dinner 'rations,' and addresses me as 'Corporal Lollypop,' (the absurd thing!) and calls ma's crinoline a 'counter-scarp.'