"And pray, Captain F.," said I, involuntarily glancing at his coat, which happened not to be by any means a new one, "do _you_ spend nine hundred a year upon dress?" "Oh! not _now_," he exclaimed; "I don't dress _now_; I never dressed but eighteen months in my life." He then explained at large to me, who, in my ignorance, had not understood what to dress meant, "that 'to dress' signified to be the first in fashion, to make it the study of one's life to appear in a new mode before anybody else; 'to sport' something new every day; and during the time he dressed," he said, "his tailor sent him down three boxes of clothes every week from town, wherever he might happen to be." Having thus satisfactorily proved, that, at a considerable expense to his pocket, he had turned himself into a sort of block for the tailors to attire in their new invented coats and waistcoats, like the wooden dolls the milliners dress up to set off their new fashions, he next poured out such a quantity of nonsense about the battle and the wounded, that he reminded me of Hotspur's account of his interview with a coxcomb of the same species: "When the fight was done,----" But why do I waste a word upon him. A Scotch acquaintance, Mr. E., of M., arrived this evening from the field, where he had been ineffectually engaged in the soul-harrowing employment of searching among the dead, the wounded, and the dying, for his youngest brother, who was nowhere to be found. He was a gallant-spirited youth of eighteen, and this was his first campaign. His horse had returned without its rider--among the multitude of wounded he could not be found. Some hopes, some faint hopes, yet remained that he might have been taken prisoner, and that he might yet appear; but there was too much reason to fear that he had perished, though where or how was unknown. Alas! every passing day made the hopes of his friends more and more improbable. No tidings were ever heard of him, and "on earth he was seen no more." The uncertainty in which the fate of this lamented young man was involved was even more dreadful than the knowledge of the worst could have been. Mrs. H.'s anxiety respecting her brother was relieved by Mr. E.'s assurance of his being in perfect safety. He could tell us nothing of the fate of those for whom we were so deeply anxious. "Do not ask me," he exclaimed, "who _is_ wounded--I cannot tell you. It would be easy to say who are _not_." Intelligence from another quarter, however, relieved our fears, and although it subsequently proved false, for the present it led us to believe that our friends were in safety.