The child of his bosom winked twice, and immediately prepared to perform the feat, only pausing long enough to look in the glass and see if his necktie sat well. Then, gaining the head of the stairs, he leaned across a bureau barring the way, and was about to grasp the big chair, when the Wayward Sister hit him over the head with a broom, and presently he found himself prostrate at the foot of the stairs, with a violent pain in his nose. On witnessing this disaster, all the neighbors shrank with indignation from the aged father, and said it was all his doings. The poor old chap scratched his head, and says he: "I don't see how it's my fault." "Why," says a neighbor of much fatness, "you're always interfering,--that's what you are. Now, you'll never get back any of your furniture." "Interfering?" says the paternal chap, innocently. "Why, how _could_ I interfere with Tommy, when I only let him do, in his own way, what he gave me to understand he was able to?" Here all the neighbors sighed grievously, and says one: "Miserable old man, we believe you mean well enough; but the fact is, you are a species of old idiot. It was your business to have had _another son_, who would have been this one's brother; so that if one met with a heart-rending failure on the stairs, the other could simultaneously have entered that back window by a ladder, and taken the chair by the rear. But you are always interfering. Take our advice now, and either give up drinking altogether, or arrange it so that those who drink with you may be persons not distinguishable from ourselves." And they all departed, shaking their heads, my boy--they all departed shaking their heads; leaving the unfortunate old chap to bind up his offspring's nose, and to reflect upon the great iniquity of interfering with one son's success, by not having another. The Government of our distracted country, my boy, is so very much like this well-meaning but imbecile old chap, that the failure of any one of its generals is entirely due to its interference in not having another general; who, in case that general did not succeed, could take his place before he failed to do so. The Military Necessity produced by this interference took place at Paris, very recently, and shortly after the new General of the Mackerel Brigade had so nearly won the battle by that revelation of manly Shape to which I referred in my last letter.