Upon arriving at a locality, which I refrain from naming, lest I should thereby betray my beloved country or make a mistake in spelling, I found the venerable and spectacled veterans of the thrice-valorous Mackerel Brigade just returned from a spirited pursuit of certain regiments of disreputable Confederacies who were stealing farms on the outskirts of Paris. These Confederacies had even penetrated into storied Accomac, and removed everything they found upon the farms there except the mortgages. Hence the demand upon the aged and unconquerable Mackerel Brigade for an immediate walk in that direction, and there they had gone by the most circuitous and profoundly strategical route afforded by the county maps. General John Smith, the latest edition of Mackerel Commander, gave leadership of his advance guard to Captain Villiam Brown, and immediately five-and-twenty inflamed reporters frantically telegraphed to as many excellent and reliable morning journals, that all the thieving Confederacies were about to be bagged, and that all the revolting details would be given in our next issue. It was toward evening, my boy, when Captain Villiam Brown, mounted upon his geometrical steed, Euclid, came riding up to the advanced head-quarters of the new general to report results. "Well, young man," says the General, with Spartan equanimity, "have we bagged the enemies of human freedom?" Villiam looked up from the demijohn under the table, upon which he had been earnestly gazing, and says he, "No, sire; but the very next thing to bagging them has occurred." "Relate the tale," says the General, with dignity. "Why," says Villiam, "instead of our bagging them, they have been sacking us." It is a remarkable and beautiful peculiarity of our flexible language, my boy, that its semi-syno-nymical effects permit the transmission of trying intelligence in terms of soothing similarity to those which might have been employed had the news been more felicitous. Thus are we let down easily from pride to humiliation, and spared much intervening agony of soul. So the Mackerel Brigade turned their gleaming old spectacles once more in the direction of our National Capital, and are again a characteristic of the landscape enclosing Washington. Further consummate strategy is postponed for a time on account of the weather, which has become villanously hot through the fanatical machinations of the insidious Black Republicans. Thus are Greeley, Beecher, Wendell Phillips, and their deluded followers weakening the military arm of the government and endeavoring to obtain fat contracts for worthless fans! Methinks I hear you ask, "Has the new general of the Mackerel Brigade made a failure, after all the credit the public have given him for superiority over his predecessors?"