Then come with me to the Mackerel camp before Paris, and mark where the antique Brigade is sitting-up with the expiring Confederacy. Observe how each morning's sun is reflected from the gleaming spectacles of the venerable military organization; while occasional rains make those same innumerable glasses resemble fairy lakes with dead fish in them. Note with what a respectable air of a reliable family physician each patriarchal warrior exhumes, from somewhere down his leg, the massive gold watch which he has been induced to buy for $10 of one of those national benefactors in jewelry who advertise affectionately in our more parental weekly journals of romance--and remarks, oracularly: "It being exactly three o'clock by this here nineteen-carat repeater, that air Confederacy has got just one hour less to live." The fact, my boy, that this timely observation would apply with about equal accuracy to the whole human family, need not deter your insidious self from answering in the affirmative, when I ask you, calmly, if it does not seem that a military organization of such intellect, _must_ be engaged in some unspeakably profound scheme of victory, even though to the uneducated eye it may present somewhat the aspect of a muddy old gentleman with his head against a stone-wall? And this business of showing the possible identity of apparent dead-pause with actual velocity, reminds me of a chap I once knew in the Sixth Ward. He was a cast-iron chap, my boy, whose most powerful conception of enterprise in trade was vividly associated with the duty of being forever in his shirt-sleeves; and he kept a hardware shop at which the economical women of America could get such bargains in flat-irons and door-plates, as were a temptation to marry none but the most impoverished young men. Many customers had this very practical hardware chap, and one of them was an aged file in a broad-brimmed hat, blue spectacles, and a silk umbrella, who had about him that air of Philadelphia which at once suggests an equal admixture of chronic slumber and profundity. Being a widower and a happy man, it was the daily custom of this aged file to spend several hours of intellectual refreshment in the hardware shop, smiling benignantly upon the ancient maidens who came thither to buy curling-tongs, and enlivening the soul of the cast-iron chap with fine, laborious treatises on the general idiocy of popular perception. "I tell you, my child," this aged file would remark, polishing his spectacles with a red silk handkerchief,--"I tell you, the popular perception wants nicety; wants delicacy; wants capacity to distinguish between the noisy, bustling style of operation by which it loves to be deceived,--_Populus vult decipi_,--and the silent, almost imperceptible agencies through which all really great results are accomplished."