After we had all duly digested this useful and sagacious General Order, my boy, Captain Samyule Sa-mith was ordered to make a detour of Duck Lake with the Anatomical Cavalry, and dig a canal in the rear of the well-known Confederacy; and the Mackerel Brigade, under the personal supervision of the Grim Old Fighting Cox, commenced to cross the pontoon-bridges in two divisions. The bridge that I was upon, my boy, was at once attacked at the other end by a surprised Confederacy with a large pair of scissors, who malignantly cut that end loose. There was an aged civilian chap, from Albany, of much stomach and a broad-brimmed hat, standing near me; and when he found the bridge beginning to move, he smote his breast, and says he: "Where are we drifting to?" "Be not alarmed, Mr. Weed," says I, pleasantly; "we shall soon repair the damage." "Hem!" says he, "I wish I'd gone over on the other platform at first." He was quite an old man, my boy, slowly sinking into the rising waves of his own fat; and for that reason appeared to have a chronic fear of some unexpected submersion. The Mackerel Brigade, in two parts, having reached the opposite shore of Duck Lake in safety, the Grim Old Fighting Cox ordered Captain Villiam Brown and Captain Bob Shorty to take each a regiment of spectacled veterans and cautiously feel the Confederacies' lines, while he led the remainder of the national troops to a small village at hand, which had particularly requested to be immediately destroyed. It was his great strategical plan, my boy, to form his lines in the shape of a triangle, thus inclosing the unmannerly Confederacies between three fires, and winning a great geometrical victory. The Confederacies being duly surrounded, and the village being set on fire at the apex of the triangle, the Grim Old Fighting Cox withdrew to a tent, spread a map of the world upon a camp-stool before him, and proceeded to take topographical observations. Drawing from his saddle-bags an instrument of opaque glass, of tubular character, quite large in circumference about half-way up, and then tapering into a neck, or smaller tube, of nearly the same length, he raised it in a semi-horizontal position to a point about one and a half inches above the lower circumference of his chin, until he could look through it at an angle bisecting its greater circumference upon the map below. The light, striking through the body of this instrument, cast a wavy, fluctuating sort of yellowish glare upon that part of the map representing the well-known Southern Confederacy, accompanied by a species of soft, trickling sound. After an interval of some ten minutes, the operator saw, by this contrivance, just double the number of Confederacies he had to contend with. It only remained, then, for him to divide the number thus ascertained by two, and he knew exactly the number of his foes!