Everything is confident and buoyant here, my boy, a sense that the President is an honest man, inspiring confidence on every side, and surrounding the Government with well-known confidence men. The repeated safety of the Capital, indeed, has even inspired the genius of New England, as illustrated by a thoughtful Boston chap, with one of those enlarged business ideas which will yet enable that section to betrade the whole world. The thoughtful Boston chap has read all the war-news, my boy, for the last six months, and as he happens to be a moral manufacturer of burglar-proof safes, a happy pecuniary thought struck him forcibly. After joining the church, to make sure of his morality here, he came hither in haste, opened an establishment, read the war-news once more, and then issued the following enterprising card: BUY THE CELEBRATED WASHINGTON SAFE! Everybody thought it was the safe they'd read so much about in the papers, my boy, and several hundreds were sold. There was another chap, named Burns, the inventor of a Family and Military Gridiron, who noticed how the thoughtful Boston chap was making money by the advertising necessities of our distracted country. Having been born in Connecticut at a very early age, my boy, he was not long in finding a way to make his own eternal fortune, after the same meritorious manner. So he at once repaired to a liquor shop, to make sure that a majority of our staff-officers would hear him, and then, says he, in stentorian tones: "My sympathies are all with the Southern Confederacy, to whom I send the weekly journals of romance on the day of publication. As to the Union," says the Connecticut chap, hotly, "I have less confidence in it than I have in my Patent Economical Family and Military Gridiron." He was immediately arrested for this seditious talk, my boy, and all the reporters telegraphed an exciting dispatch to the reliable morning journals: "_Exciting Affair--Arrest of an Influential Rebel!_--The celebrated Mr. Burns has been arrested for publicly saying that he had more confidence in his well-known and ingenious patent Economical Family and Military Gridiron than he had in the Union. Upon hearing of his incarceration, the most sanguine rebel sympathizers here admitted that the cause of the South was lost forever." The Connecticut chap remained in custody until he had received four hundred orders for gridirons, from private families and army-chaplains, and then he explained that the words he had used were uttered in the heat of passion, and he was, of course, honorably discharged from prison, to make way for a shameless, aged miscreant just committed for two years' hard labor, on suspicion of having discouraged enlistments by asserting that, although he was too old to go to the war himself, he intended to send a substitute. Simultaneously, all the reporters telegraphed again to the reliable morning journals: