lature at its next session, and it is earnestly trusted the lessons of experience will not be unheeded. It is confidently hoped the assembled wisdom of the nation will, by legislative action, create a permanent military establishment commensurate with the exalted position, the present and increasing peace necessities, and the boundless resources of the Republic, with an organization that may be readily expanded, by simply increasing promptly the personnel of the ranks through the agency of a well-regulated and thoroughly enforced system of conscription, to meet the exigencies of any danger which may threaten the national safety.

With such a permanent military establishment, receiving, as it is confidently believed it would, the cordial and enlightened support of the vast majority of the intelligent and substantial population of the country, and with the adjunct of a sufficient navy, organized as could be so readily suggested by those great naval heroes, Farragut, Porter, et id omne genus, the great Republic would move smoothly and serenely onward in its career of coextensive greatness and usefulness, secured against all violence, whether foreign or domestic, and diffusing the blessings of free institutions, sustained by a permanent government, to a free, happy, prosperous, and intelligent people. May such be the career of the great Republic, the duration of whose existence will be told in millenniums!

THE SEASONS' TILT.

BY GEORGE COOPER.

SIR AUTUMN flings his gauntlet down,
And to battle Sir Winter dares:
Through withered woods, the herald wind,
From his trumpet the challenge blares.

With rude retainers, from castle-keep,
Strides Sir Winter in mailed might;
His blade was forged in the crackling flames
That swirl in the Northern Light.

The waning Year their tourney sees;
But Sir Autumn, brave and bold,
Lies purple-stained, with shivered lance,
On the knightly cloth of gold.

SEEKING THE BUBBLE.

* * * "Then a soldier,

Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard;
Jealous in honor; sudden and quick in quarrel;
Seeking the bubble reputation

Even in the cannon's mouth ***""

-AS YOU LIKE IT. Act II., Scene VII.

VIII.

AMONG OTHER THINGS, ABOUT MULES.

THE next morning after my installation in Colonel Cromwell's office, as acting-assistant adjutant-general, as the order said, I set to work in blind earnest, according to the colonel's directions of the previous afternoon, to familiarize myself with my new duties; though what those duties were to be, I confess I had not the most remote conception, the dominant idea prevailing in my mind, at that moment, being that somehow I had not been dismissed, as I had confidently expected to be when LieutenantColonel Lastoe gave me the order to report at Department head-quarters. Had I known what was in store for me the untold woes symbolized, though to me concealed, by the three A's and one G which I was now authorized and required to append to my official signature-my pleasure at escaping from unmerited disgrace might have been marred by a horrible doubt. But fortunately, most fortunately, we mortals are so constructed that, barring dyspepsia and the like disturbants of our normal balance, we cannot see round the corner. What would become of us, if we could?

So, in blissful ignorance of teamsters, the young mule browsed at will among the new pastures. Curious and wonderful were many of the things that caught my attention. First and foremost were those awful consolidated morning reports, terribly familiar to every adjutant, general or special, come back to plague me, but grown into a gigantic sheet, crossed and recrossed with an interminable array of red columns and red lines, and filled with a reckless waste of red figures and black figures alarming to contemplate. Who invented consolidated morning reports? Why do they have them? What does who do with them? I asked myself; but not even echo, although currently supposed to solve all questions otherwise unanswerable, was sufficiently audacious to venture on a response. I was informed by Lieutenant Chipps, the officer on whom the weight of this nuisance

1

had been devolved by the Adjutant-General, that General Bulger insisted upon having a full return made out every day; the consequence of which appeared to be that the reports were now just seven weeks behindhand, and were being rapidly gained on, while the Adjutant-General of the Army at Washington was frantically demanding impossible monthly returns for remote periods in the forgotten past. Chipps might have been any age, from twenty-five to forty, being certainly either very young for his looks, or else looking very old for his age. He seemed to have gone through one of those desiccating processes that have been so successfully applied to milk and eggs and vegetables, and, like those articles, to have become thereby very much condensed in bulk and changed in color and appearance, without suffering any material loss of the essential virtues. I found him a very quiet man, charged with about two dozen fixed and finite opinions, or "facts," as he styled them, which, from internal evidences, I should say were acquired at a very tender age, and had simply become hardened by time, without perceptible addition or subtraction. When I add that he wore amazingly high shirt-collars, chewed a great deal of leaf tobacco, apparently without spitting, read a pocket edition of Moore's poems in the intervals of consolidated morning reports, and was never known to write or receive a letter, I say all I know of him.

Rolles I found to be a very muscular young Christian, indeed; and I could not help fancying that the singular affection which evidently subsisted between him and the sharp, finely-tempered Colonel was all that kept him in the office. Certainly he was very much out of place anywhere within pistol-range of pen, ink, and paper; for, with one or two notable exceptions, I have rarely met a man with a more unhappy fatality of getting the English language into a snarl, and writing just what he did not mean. No amount of remonstrance could persuade him that the form of expression used made the slightest difference: so long as he himself understood it, that was enough. As we walked up to Colonel Cromwell's tent to dine, the big boy informed me, in answer to one section of my catechism, that his department was the "heavy standing around;" and I soon found that this uncouth phrase was sufficiently descriptive. I may as well confess that my opinion of this young gentleman underwent a material modification some weeks later, when I saw him waked up at the assault of Muddy Fort.

These two officers and myself, with eleven clerks, detailed from the different regiments in the department, constituted the effective force of Colonel Cromwell's office. That peculiar man required us to work, with the regularity of machinery and the punctuality of a chronometer, from eight o'clock in the morning until noon, and from one to three in the afternoon, every day. It was no idle theory with him, that six hours of mental labor

VOL. IV.-32

were just enough for the man and the work. "The machine preserves its uniform efficiency, and the product is its best," he used to say; "no use of dilution; gain in extensity is lost in intensity." He seemed on such familiar terms with all words that I scarcely noticed that these terms were not of daily use, until they were reduced to ink. Ink is to language what the photograph is to nature: it preserves the form indeed, but crucifies the expression.

After I had loafed about the office a few days, reading up the order and letter books, and puzzling over the documents that came pouring in in a steady stream, like grist to the hopper, Colonel Cromwell informed me that my special department would be the correspondence, Rolles taking charge of the issue of general and special orders under his personal direction. This sounded to me, then, much grander than it turned out, for I presently discovered that my management of the correspondence consisted of such things as translating the colonel's phonoglyph, "A F-A G" into "Approved and respectfully forwarded to the Adjutant-General of the Army., MajorGeneral Commanding." By the way, it occurred to me that this blank would have been quite as expressive without the signature of one Julius Bulger. "No" had to be interpreted, "Sir: In reply, &c., &c., asking, &c., &c., the Commanding General directs me to inform you that the interests of the public service do not admit of a compliance with your request." "" The Commanding General directs: what a ton of satire is hidden under that thin phrase! It scared me terribly at first to find that the Commanding General neither directed one in a thousand of the many things done in his name, nor even knew of their being ordered; but the custom of service, the unwritten and inflexible law of armies, sanctifies the fiction. And perhaps it is as well. How else would some commanders that you and I know of, dear reader, have weathered the northeast wind that blows removals to the south? Napoleon cut square. across the knot in the campaign of Italy, but "nice customs," even while they "curt'sy to great kings," change not in their substance, for see what became of the Napoleonic creation in our own war!.... But that is hardly a fair argument either; for we Saxons, though we rush madly into the footsteps of the Frenchman, generally manage to obliterate the delicate Parisian imprint with the heavy tread of our double-soled brogan. We copy the French names, indeed, but where are the French things? Where is the Chef d'Etat Major, whom we and our late English cousins tried to import? I suppose we all remember the "B'ys, I'm wid ye," that so grotesquely betrayed the origin of at least one enthusiastic member of the Garde Lafayette, when that regiment retired and the 62d went forward at Fair Oaks. I do not vouch for the fable, but fully subscribe to the moral.

It was at the dinner to which Colonel Cromwell had been kind enough to invite his new assistant (who has ungratefully been letting the soup cool itself to jelly, while he was indulging in one of his pet long-winded digressions), that the colonel took advantage of a favorable gap in the conversation and dishes to insert his promised story about the mule. It was originally the property, he said (meaning the story), of a splendid fellow who had served as inspector-general on the same staff with him in Grant's army at Donelson and Shiloh; the scene had been witnessed in General Halleck's muddy and cautious advance on Corinth, and had been told to Colonel Cromwell as he lay wounded in one of the hospitals at Cairo. From that moment, he said, his wound began to heal. A four-mule team had become hopelessly tangled up in the road by the refractory conduct of one of its members. The teamster, dismounted and up to his boot-tops in mud, was beating the balky animal with the butt end of his whip. To him, arrives, horror-stricken, a tract-bearing member of some commission, and attempts to reason with the teamster-reason with a teamster!-then gently to expostulate, next decidedly to rebuke firstly for his brutality, secondly for his added and earoffending profanity; for by this time the mule has begun to kick madly, but with excellent intention, and the ass to swear terrible mouthsful. "My friend," finally remarks the man of tracts, designing an impressive climax-" My friend, you should not beat that poor dumb animal so. How would you like it yourself?" "Go to-," I will not say where, exclaims the infuriated teamster with many ar-I will not say what -besides, and seizing a huge fence-rail, whereof there were still a few left in the State of Mississippi in those early days, begins to belabor therewith the back of the unfortunate beast. "If he-don't-like it," he shouts, breathlessly and between whacks, "WHY-WAS HE-A MU-EL?-say !" Whereupon Rolles burst into a roar, and laughed till the tears ran down his fat cheeks, while Doctor Crippler cackled till he was purple and had brought on a violent cough, and poor Jenkins upset his camp-stool, and a whole dish of tomatoes, under the influence of the surprise, and, it is unnecessary to say, continued to giggle at the shortest notice during the remainder of the evening. The colonel looked inexpressibly pleased, but merely smiled, called to the attending contraband to bring more tomatoes, and occupied himself in tracing my name on the table-cloth with the end of a clean fork.

"That story," he said presently, when we had somewhat returned to civilized life, is like a sword-cane in one respect: it hides its true point. Though the subject belongs to the Quartermaster's Department, the application is universal. When ever anybody beats you with a fence-rail, and you don't like it, as I fancy you won't, ask yourself, 'Why was you a mule?'