It was on Tuesday morning that I ascended majestically to the slanting roof of my Gothic steed, the sagacious Pegasus, and moved perceptibly across Long Bridge once more, toward the camp of the Mackerel Brigade. It is worthy of note, my boy, that the architectural animal in question has greatly improved of late upon a diet of condemned straw hats, and now trots an hour in sixty minutes with the greatest ease of manner. An occasional cough but adds to the melancholy interest of his funereal cast of countenance; and as his head grows more and more vivid in its resemblance to an infant's coffin, his whole effect deepens in its churchliness and sepulchral solemnity. As I neared the national head-quarters, the Mackerel Surgeon-General saluted me, and I observed that he kept his glance dreamily fixed upon the Gothic Pegasus. "As I gaze upon that bony fabric," says he, biting a piece of calamus in soft professional abstraction,--"as I gaze upon that fleet skeleton you bestride, I cannot help thinking that Rule Britannia is frequently right in speaking of a horse as an 'oss; though she may use a superfluous 's' in the word. You see," says the surgeon, pausing to take a gray powder, and to try his lancet on his left thumb-nail,--"you see, the classical term '_os_' signifies bone; and as bone is the prevailing aspect of your present charger, he might be termed an '_'os_' without violence to the lingual proprieties." I have always suspected this surgeon, my boy, of being an accursed secessionist in disguise, and now I feel confident that he would not hesitate, if opportunity offered, to carry his fiendish affection for the well-known Southern Confederacy to the extent of actually differing with me upon some point in conversation. In such times as these, my boy, there can be no middle ground for a man; he must either be heart and soul with his country's murderous foes, or ready to agree entirely with me in anything I may say or think. God save the Republic!