The Orpheus C. Kerr Papers, Series 1. R. H. Newell
The country all about Pinch Gut
So beautiful did seem,
That the beholder thought it like
A picture in a dream.
But the plantations near Burnt Coat
Were even finer still,
And made the wond'ring tourist feel
A soft, delicious thrill.
At Tear Shirt too, the scenery
Most charming did appear,
With Snatch It in the distance far,
And Purgatory near.
But spite of all these pleasant scenes,
The tourist stoutly swore,
That home is brightest, after all,
And travel is a bore.
So back he went to Maine, straightway,
A little wife he took;
And now is making nutmegs at
Moosehicmagunticook.
In his note, introductory of this poem, my boy, the editor of the Lily affirmed (which is strictly true) that I had named none but veritable localities; and ventured the belief that the composition would remind his readers of Goldsmith. Upon which his scorpion contemporary in the next village observed, that there was rather more smith than gold about the poem. Genius, my boy, is never appreciated until its possessor is dead; and even the useless praise it then obtains is chiefly due to the pleasure that is experienced in burying the poor wretch.
Up to the time when this poem appeared in print, I had succeeded in concealing from my father the nature of my incidental occupation; but now he must know all.
He did know all, my boy; and the result was, that he gave me ten dollars, and sent me to New York to look out for myself.
"It's the only thing that will save him," says he to my mother, "and I must either send him off, or expect to see him sink by degrees to editorship, and commence to wear disgraceful clothes."
I went to New York; I became private secretary and speech-scribe to an unscrupulous and, therefore, rising politician; and now—I am in Washington.
Thus, my boy, have I answered your desire for an outline of my personal history; and henceforth let me devote my attention to other and more important inhabitants of our distracted country. I had a certain postmastership in my eye when I first came hither; but war's alarms indicate that I may do better as an amateur hero.
Yours inconoclastically,
Orpheus C. Kerr.
LETTER IV.
DESCRIBING THE SOUTH IN TWELVE LINES, DEFINING THE CITIZEN'S FIRST DUTY, AND RECITING A PARODY.
Washington, D.C., April—, 1861.
The chivalrous South, my boy, has taken Fort Sumter, and only wants to be "let alone." Some things of a Southern sort I like, my boy; Southdown mutton is fit for the gods, and Southside particular is liquid sunshine for the heart; but the whole country was growing tired of new South wails before this, and my present comprehensive estimate of all there is of Dixie may be summed up in twelve straight lines, under the general heading of
REPUDIATION.
'Neath a ragged palmetto a Southerner sat,
A-twisting the band of his Panama hat,
And trying to lighten his mind of a load
By humming the words of the following ode:
"Oh! for a nigger, and oh! for a whip;
Oh! for a cocktail, and oh! for a nip;
Oh! for a shot at old Greeley and Beecher;
Oh! for a crack at a Yankee school-teacher;
Oh! for a captain, and oh! for a ship;
Oh! for a cargo of niggers each trip."
And so he kept oh-ing for all he had not,
Not contented with owing for all that he'd got.
In view of the impending conflict, it is the duty of every American citizen, who has nothing else to do, to take up his abode in the capital of this agonized Republic, and give the Cabinet the sanction of his presence. Some base child of treason may intimate that Washington is not quite large enough to hold every American citizen; but I'm satisfied that, if all the democrats could have one good washing, they would shrink so that you might put the whole blessed party into an ordinary custom house. Some of the republicans are pretty large chaps for their size, but Jeff Davis thinks they can be "taken in" easily enough; and I know that the new tariff will be enough to make them contract like sponges out of water. The city is full of Western chaps, at present, who look as if they had just walked out of a charity-hospital, and had not got beyond gruel diet yet. Every soul of them knew old Abe when he was a child, and one old boy can even remember going for a doctor when his mother was born. I met one of them the other day (he is after the Moosehicmagunticook post-office), and his anecdotes of the President's boyhood brought tears to my eyes, and several tumblers to my lips. He says, that when Abe was an infant of sixteen, he split so many rails that his whole county looked like a wholesale lumber-yard for a week; and that when he took to flat-boating, he was so tall and straight, that a fellow once took him for a smoke-stack on a steamboat, and didn't find out his mistake until he tried to kindle a fire under him. Once, while Abe was practising as a lawyer, he defended a man for stealing a horse, and was so eloquent in proving that his client was an honest victim of false suspicion, that the deeply-affected victim made him a present of the horse as soon as he was acquitted. I tell you what, my boy, if Abe pays a post-office for every story of his childhood that's told, the mail department of this glorious nation will be so large that a letter smaller than a two-story house would get lost in it.
Of all the vile and damning deeds that ever rendered a city eternally infamous, my boy—of all the infernal sins of dark-browed treachery that ever made open-faced treason seem holy, the crime of Baltimore is the blackest and worst. All that April day we were waiting with bated breath and beating hearts for the devoted men who had pledged their lives to their country at the first call of the President, and were known to be marching to the defence of the nation's capital. That night was one of terror: at any moment the hosts of the rebels might pour upon the city from the mountains of guilty Virginia, and grasp the very throat of the Republic. And with the first dim light of morning came the news that our soldiers had been basely beset in the streets of Baltimore, and ruthlessly shot down by a treacherous mob! Those whom they had trusted as brothers, my boy—whose country they were marching to defend with their lives—assassinating them in cold blood!
I was sitting in my room at Willard's, when a serious chap from New Haven, who had just paused long enough at the door to send a waiter for the same that he had yesterday, came rushing into the apartment with a long, fluttering paper in his hand.
"Listen to this," says he, in wild agitation, and read:
BALTIMORE.
Midnight shadows, dark, appalling, round the Capitol were falling,
And its dome and pillars glimmered spectral from Potomac's shore;
All the great had gone to slumber, and of all the busy number
That had moved the State by day within its walls, as erst before,
None there were but dreamed of heroes thither sent ere day was o'er—
Thither sent through Baltimore.
But within a chamber solemn, barred aloft with