This gray-headed pen of mine, my boy,--which is mightier than the sword, inasmuch as it can, itself, "draw" the sword when it chooses, quite as accurately as any pencil-vanian,--has run the blockade recently imposed upon it, and once more gambols nervously down the lines of contemporaneous military history. When first I heard that aphorism of the elegant and ghostly Bulwer, by which the sober sceptre of the scribe is magnified above the fancy-dress weapon of the hero, I took it to be like any other high-sounding sentiment of the stage, whereby the poor but virtuous editor was nobly and improvingly encouraged to believe himself rather more powerful in this universe than all its great captains put together. Being a child of the pen myself, I felt benignantly inflated by the venerable "Richelieu's" excellent remark, and looked with much generous pity upon a crushed young army officer in the box next to mine; but, at the same time, I remember that it reminded me of the exceedingly moral popular delusion making starving virtue a much pleasanter and more admirable thing to possess than a king's crown; and I also remember how it thereupon dawned upon me, that the pen was possibly mightier than the sword only in the far-removed sense of Might being Write. Since I have lived in Washington, however, I have learned, my boy, that the sentiment in question is capable of demonstration as a very plain fact; seeing, as I do, that off-hand strokes of the pen can in a very few minutes promote into Major Generals and Brigadiers certain pleasing brass-buttoned chaps whose actual swords could never have done as much for them in all their lives. And yet, my boy, if all those powerful, unsordid creatures, our country editors, had their youths to live over again, I verily believe that two-thirds of them would sooner be put to the sword than put to the pen. Such is man!