Last evening, at dusk, I was talking to the Mackerel Chaplain about this singular strategical affair, and says he: "God help us! The skeleton regiments we have left standing are scarcely more than the skeleton regiments we have left sleeping; and only the sleeping ones can look upward." Let gentle charity, my boy, silence our tongues to the dread mistake that is past; for he who made it lost by it the glorious immortality his meanest soldier slain has won. Yours, gently, ORPHEUS C. KERR. LETTER XCIV. AFFORDING AN INSTANCE OF IMPERCEPTIBLE PATRIOTISM; PRESENTING THE PROFOUND COMMENTARY OF AN EMINENT FOREIGN MILITARY CRITIC; AND REPORTING THE LAST EFFUSION OF THE GENERAL OF THE MACKEREL BRIGADE. WASHINGTON, D.C., May 17th, 1863. When great interests are at stake, my boy, and strong passions are excited, and when it becomes necessary that a whole nation shall be unanimous for its own preservation from destruction, we occasionally meet with chaps of severe countenance and much shirt-ruffles, whose patriotism is purely that of descent, and not at all of assent. Since this great strategic war commenced, I have encountered divers iron-faced and brass-mounted conservative fellow-beings, whose sentiments in action have seemed to establish as an inevitable postulate in logic, that a man sired by a hero of '76, must naturally be damn'd by the heroes of '63; and that a man with Revolutionary blood in his veins is entirely exempted from all legitimacy to a propensity for spilling the least drop of that sacred liquid in behalf of a cause not Revolutionary. It was on Tuesday, my boy, that I met the Honorable Fernando Fuel, the member-elect from the Sixth Ward, who had come hither for the express purpose of getting up for himself an entirely new coat of arms, according to New York Heraldry, and of procuring from some scholar a recondite couplet that should at once serve, in motto form, to denote his Revolutionary descent, and express his high moral patriotism as apart from any partisan desire to see injuries inflicted upon the Wayward Sisters of his distracted country. He came to me, and says he: