:-

I have the honour of sending you, for your magazine, an article
which I hope you will be able to comprehend rather more
distinctly than I do myself. It is a translation, by my friend
Martin Van Buren Mavis (sometimes called the 'Poughkeepsie
Seer'), of an odd-looking MS, which I found, about a year ago,
tightly corked up in a jug floating in the --a
sea well described by the Nubian geographer, but seldom visited
now-a-days, except by the transcendentalists and divers for
crotchets.--
Very truly,
EDGAR A. POE
ON BOARD BALLOON 'SKYLARK'
 1, 2848

Now, my dear friend--now, for your sins, you are to suffer the
infliction of a long gossiping letter. I tell you distinctly
that I am going to punish you for all your impertinences by being
as tedious, as discursive, as incoherent and as unsatisfactory as
possible. Besides, here I am, cooped up in a dirty balloon, with
some one or two hundred of the , all bound on a excursion (what a funny idea some people have of
pleasure!), and I have no prospect of touching 
for a month at least. Nobody to talk to. Nothing to do. When
one has nothing to do, then is the time to correspond with one's
friends. You perceive, then, why it is that I write you this
letter--it is on account of my and your sins.
Get ready your spectacles and make up your mind to be
annoyed. I mean to write at you every day during this odious
voyage.
Heigho! when will any visit the human
pericranium? Are we for ever to be doomed to the thousand
inconveniences of the balloon? Will contrive a more
expeditious mode of progress? This jog-trot movement, to my
thinking, is little less than positive torture. Upon my word we
have not made more than a hundred miles the hour since leaving
home! The very birds beat us--at least some of them. I assure
you that I do not exaggerate at all. Our motion, no doubt, seems
slower than it actually is--this on account of our having no
objects about us by which to estimate our velocity, and on
account of our going the wind. To be sure, whenever we
meet a balloon we have a chance of perceiving our rate, and then,
I admit, things do not appear so very bad. Accustomed as I am to
this mode of travelling, I cannot get over a kind of giddiness
whenever a balloon passes in a current directly overhead. It
always seems to me like an immense bird of prey about to pounce
upon us and carry us off in its claws. One went over us this
morning about sunrise, and so nearly overhead that its drag-rope
actually brushed the net-work suspending our car, and caused us
very serious apprehension. Our captain said that if the material
of the bag had been the trumpery varnished 'silk' of five hundred
or a thousand years ago, we should inevitably have been damaged.
This silk, as he explained it to me, was a fabric composed of the
entrails of a species of earthworm. The worm was carefully fed
on mulberries--a kind of fruit resembling a watermelon--and, when
sufficiently fat, was crushed in a mill. The paste thus arising
was called in its primary state, and went through a
variety of processes until it finally became 'silk'. Singular to
relate, it was once much admired as an article of ! Balloons were also very generally constructed from it.
A better kind of material, it appears, was subsequently found in
the down surrounding the seed-vessels of a plant vulgarly called
, and at that time botanically termed milkweed.
This latter kind of silk was designated as silk-buckingham, on
account of its superior durability, and was usually prepared for
use by being varnished with a solution of gum caoutchouc--a
substance which in some respects must have resembled the now in common use. This caoutchouc was occasionally
called India rubber or rubber of whist, and was no doubt one of
the numerous . Never tell me again that I am not at
heart an antiquarian.
Talking of drag-ropes--our own, it seems, has this moment
knocked a man overboard from one of the small magnetic propellers
that swarm in ocean below us--a boat of about six thousand tons,
and, from all accounts, shamefully crowded. These diminutive
barques should be prohibited from carrying more than a definite
number of passengers. The man, of course, was not permitted to
get on board again, and was soon out of sight, he and his life-
preserver. I rejoice, my dear friend, that we live in an age so
enlightened that no such a thing as an individual is supposed to
exist. It is the mass for which the true Humanity cares. By the
way, talking of Humanity, do you know that our immortal Wiggins
is not so original in his views of the Social Condition and so
forth, as his contemporaries are inclined to suppose? Pundit
assures me that the same ideas were put, nearly in the same way,
about a thousand years ago, by an Irish philosopher called
Furrier, on account of his keeping a retail shop for cat-peltries
and other furs. Pundit , you know; there can be no
mistake about it. How very wonderfully do we see verified, every
day, the profound observation of the Hindoo Aries Tottle (as
quoted by Pundit)--'Thus must we say that, not once or twice, or
a few times, but with almost infinite repetitions, the same
opinions come round in a circle among men.'
 2.-- Spoke to-day the magnetic cutter in charge
of the middle section of the floating telegraph wires. I learn
that when this species of telegraph was first put into operation
by Horse, it was considered quite impossible to convey the wires
over sea; but now we are at a loss to comprehend where the
difficulty lay! So wags the world. --excuse
me for quoting the Etruscan. What we do without the
Atlantic telegraph? (Pundit says Atlantic was the ancient
adjective.) We lay to a few minutes to ask the cutter some
questions, and learned, among other glorious news, that civil war
is raging in Africa, while the plague is doing its good work
beautifully both in Yurope and Ayesher. Is it not truly
remarkable that, before the magnificent light shed upon
philosophy by Humanity, the world was accustomed to regard War
and Pestilence as calamities? Do you know that prayers were
actually offered up in the ancient temples to the end that these
 (!) might not be visited upon mankind? Is it not
really difficult to comprehend upon what principle of interest
our forefathers acted? Were they so blind as not to perceive
that the destruction of a myriad of individuals is only so much
positive advantage to the mass!
 3.-- It is really a very fine amusement to ascend
the rope-ladder leading to the summit of the balloon-bag and
thence survey the surrounding world. From the car below, you
know, the prospect is not so comprehensive--you can see little
vertically. But seated here (where I write this) in the
luxuriously-cushioned open piazza of the summit, one can see
everything that is going on in all directions. Just now, there
is quite a crowd of balloons in sight, and they present a very
animated appearance, while the air is resonant with the hum of so
many millions of human voices. I have heard it asserted that
when Yellow or (as Pundit have it) Violet, who is
supposed to have been the first aeronaut, maintained the
practicability of traversing the atmosphere in all directions, by
merely ascending or descending until a favourable current was
attained, he was scarcely hearkened to at all by his
contemporaries, who looked upon him as merely an ingenious sort
of madman, because the philosophers(?) of the day declared the
thing impossible. Really now it does seem to me 
unaccountable how anything so obviously feasible could have
escaped the sagacity of the ancient . But in all ages
the great obstacles to advancement in Art have been opposed by
the so-called men of science. To be sure, men of science
are not quite so bigoted as those of old;--oh, I have something
 queer to tell you on this topic. Do you know that it is
not more than a thousand years ago since the metaphysicians
consented to relieve the people of the singular fancy that there
existed but !
Believe it if you can! It appears that long, long ago, in the
night of Time, there lived a Turkish philosopher (or Hindoo
possibly) called Aries Tottle. This person introduced, or at all
events propagated, what was termed the deductive or 
mode of investigation. He started with what he maintained to be
 or 'self-evident truths', and thence proceeded
'logically' to results. His greatest disciples were one Neuclid
and one Cant. Well, Aries Tottle flourished supreme until the
advent of one Hog, surnamed the 'Ettrick Shepherd', who preached
an entirely different system, which he called the or ductive. His plan referred altogether to
Sensation. He proceeded by observing, analysing, and classifying
facts--, as they were affectedly called--
into general laws. Aries Tottle's mode, in a word, was based on
; Hog's on . Well, so great was the
admiration excited by this latter system that, at its first
introduction, Aries Tottle fell into disrepute; but finally he
recovered ground, and was permitted to divide the realm of Truth
with his more modern rival. The now maintained that
the Aristotelian and roads were the sole possible
avenues to knowledge. 'Baconian', you must know, was an
adjective invented as equivalent to Hog-ian and more euphonious
and dignified.
Now, my dear friend, I do assure you, most positively, that
I represent this matter fairly, on the soundest authority; and
you can easily understand how a notion so absurd on its very face
must have operated to retard the progress of all true knowledge--
which makes its advances almost invariably by intuitive bounds.
The ancient idea confined investigation to ; and for
hundreds of years so great was the infatuation about Hog
especially, that a virtual end was put to all thinking properly
so called. No man dared utter a truth to which he felt himself
indebted to his alone. It mattered not whether the
truth was even a truth, for the bullet-headed of the time regarded only by which he had
attained it. They would not even at the end. 'Let us
see the means,' they cried, 'the means!' If, upon investigation
of the means, it was found to come neither under the category
Aries (that is to say Ram) nor under the category Hog, why then
the went no farther, but pronounced the 'theorist' a
fool, and would have nothing to do with him or his truth.
Now, it cannot be maintained, even that by the crawling
system the greatest amount of truth would be attained in any long
series of ages, for the repression of was an evil
not to be compensated for by any superior in the
ancient modes of investigation. The error of these Jurmains,
these Vrinch, these Inglitch, and these Amriccans (the latter, by
the way, were our own immediate progenitors), was an error quite
analogous with that of the wiseacre who fancies that he must
necessarily see an object the better the more closely he holds it
to his eyes. These people blinded themselves by details. When
they proceeded Hoggishly, their 'facts' were by no means always
facts--a matter of little consequence had it not been for
assuming that they facts and must be facts because they
appeared to be such. When they proceeded on the path of the Ram,
their course was scarcely as straight as a ram's horn, for they
 an axiom which was an axiom at all. They must have
been very blind not to see this, even in their own day; for even
in their own day many of the long 'established' axioms had been
rejected. For example--''; 'a body cannot
act where it is not'; 'there cannot exist antipodes'; 'darkness
cannot come out of light'--all these, and a dozen other similar
propositions, formerly admitted without hesitation as axioms,
were, even at the period of which I speak, seen to be untenable.
How absurd in these people, then, to persist in putting faith in
'axioms' as immutable bases of Truth! But even out of the mouths
of their soundest reasoners it is easy to demonstrate the
futility, the impalpability of their axioms in general. Who the soundest of their logicians? Let me see! I will go and
ask Pundit and be back in a minute. . . . Ah, here we have it!
Here is a book written nearly a thousand years ago, and lately
translated from the Inglitch--which, by the way, appears to have
been the rudiment of the Amriccan. Pundit says it is decidedly
the cleverest ancient work on its topic, Logic. The author (who
was much thought of in his day) was one Miller, or Mill; and we
find it recorded of him, as a point of some importance, that he
had a mill-horse called Bentham. But let us glance at the
treatise!
Ah!--'Ability or inability to conceive,' said Mr Mill, very
properly, 'is in no case to be received as a criterion of
axiomatic truth.' What in his senses would ever think
of disputing this truism? The only wonder with us must be, how
it happened that Mr Mill conceived it necessary even to hint at
anything so obvious. So far good--but let us turn over another
page. What have we here?--'Contradictions cannot both be true--
that is, cannot co-exist in nature.' Here Mr Mill means, for
example, that a tree must be either a tree or not a tree--that it
cannot be at the same time a tree and not a tree. Very well; but
I ask him . His reply is this--and never pretends to be
anything else than this--'Because it is impossible to conceive
that contradictories can both be true.' But this is no answer at
all, by his own showing; for has he not just admitted as a truism
that 'ability or inability to conceive is to be
received as a criterion of axiomatic truth'?
Now I do not complain of these ancients so much because
their logic is, by their own showing, utterly baseless,
worthless, and fantastic altogether, as because of their pompous
and imbecile proscription of all roads of Truth, of all
 means for its attainment than the two preposterous
paths--the one of creeping and the one of crawling--to which they
have dared to confine the Soul that loves nothing so well as to
.
By the by, my dear friend, do you not think it would have
puzzled these ancient dogmaticians to have determined by of their two roads it was that the most important and most
sublime of their truths was, in effect, attained? I mean
the truth of Gravitation. Newton owed it to Kepler. Kepler
admitted that his three laws were --these three
laws of all laws which led the great Inglitch mathematician to
his principle, the basis of all physical principle--to go behind
which we must enter the Kingdom of Metaphysics. Kepler guessed--
that is to say, . He was essentially a 'theorist'--
that word now of so much sanctity, formerly an epithet of
contempt. Would it not have puzzled these old moles, too, to
have explained by which of the two 'roads' a cryptographist
unriddles a cryptograph of more than usual secrecy, or by which
of the two roads Champollion directed mankind to those enduring
and almost innumerable truths which resulted from his deciphering
the Hieroglyphics?
One word more on this topic and I will be done boring you.
Is it not strange that, with their eternal prating
about to Truth, these bigoted people missed what we now
so clearly perceive to be the great highway--that of Consistency?
Does it not seem singular how they should have failed to deduce
from the works of God the vital fact that a perfect consistency
 an absolute truth! How plain has been our progress
since the late announcement of this proposition! Investigation
has been taken out of the hands of the ground-moles and given, as
a task, to the true and only true thinkers, the men of ardent
imagination. These latter . Can you not fancy the
shout of scorn with which my words would be received by our
progenitors were it possible for them to be now looking over my
shoulder? These men, I say, ; and their theories are
simply corrected, reduced, systematized--cleared, little by
little, of their dross of inconsistency--until, finally, a
perfect consistency stands apparent which even the most stolid
admit, because it a consistency, to be an absolute and an
unquestionable .
 4.-- The new gas is doing wonders, in conjunction
with the new improvement with gutta percha. How very safe,
commodious, manageable, and in every respect convenient are our
modern balloons! Here is an immense one approaching us at the
rate of at least a hundred and fifty miles an hour. It seems to
be crowded with people--perhaps there are three or four hundred
passengers--and yet it soars to an elevation of nearly a mile,
looking down upon poor us with sovereign contempt. Still a
hundred or even two hundred miles an hour is slow travelling,
after all. you remember our flight on the railroad across
the Kanadaw continent?--fully three hundred miles the hour-- was travelling. Nothing to be seen though--nothing to be
done but flirt, feast and dance in the magnificent saloons. Do
you remember what an odd sensation was experienced when, by
chance, we caught a glimpse of external objects while the cars
were in full flight? Everything seemed unique--in one mass. For
my part, I cannot say but that I preferred the travelling by the
slow train of a hundred miles the hour. Here we were permitted
to have glass windows--even to have them open--and something like
a distinct view of the country was attainable. . . . Pundit says
that for the great Kanadaw railroad must have been
in some measure marked out about nine hundred years ago! In
fact, he goes so far as to assert that actual traces of a road
are still discernible--traces referable to a period quite as
remote as that mentioned. The track, it appears, was 
only; ours, you know, has twelve paths; and three or four new
ones are in preparation. The ancient rails were very slight, and
placed so close together as to be, according to modern notions,
quite frivolous, if not dangerous in the extreme. The present
width of track--fifty feet--is considered, indeed, scarcely
secure enough. For my part, I make no doubt that a track of some
sort have existed in very remote times, as Pundit
asserts; for nothing can be clearer, to my mind, than that, at
some period--not less than seven centuries ago, certainly--the
Northern and Southern Kanadaw continents were ; the
Kanawdians, then, would have been driven, by necessity, to a
great railroad across the continent.
 5.-- I am almost devoured by . Pundit
is the only conversible person on board; and he, poor soul! can
speak of nothing but antiquities. He has been occupied all the
day in the attempt to convince me that the ancient Amriccans !--did ever anybody hear of such an
absurdity?--that they existed in a sort of every-man-for-himself
confederacy, after the fashion of the 'prairie dogs' that we read
of in fable. He says that they started with the queerest idea
conceivable, viz.: that all men are born free and equal--this in
the very teeth of the laws of so visibly impressed
upon all things both in the moral and physical universe. Every
man 'voted', as they called it--that is to say, meddled with
public affairs--until, at length, it was discovered that what is
everybody's business is nobody's, and that the 'Republic' (so the
absurd thing was called) was without a government at all. It is
related, however, that the first circumstance which disturbed,
very particularly, the self-complacency of the philosophers who
constructed this 'Republic', was the startling discovery that
universal suffrage gave opportunity for fraudulent schemes, by
means of which any desired number of votes might at any time be
polled, without the possibility of prevention or even detection,
by any party which should be merely villainous enough not to be
ashamed of the fraud. A little reflection upon this discovery
sufficed to render evident the consequences, which were that
rascality predominate--in a word, that a republican
government never be anything but a rascally one. While
the philosophers, however, were busied in blushing at their
stupidity in not having foreseen these inevitable evils, and
intent upon the invention of new theories, the matter was put to
an abrupt issue by a fellow of the name of , who took
everything into his own hands and set up a despotism, in
comparison with which those of the fabulous Zeros and Hello-
fagabaluses were respectable and delectable. This Mob (a
foreigner, by the by) is said to have been the most odious of all
men that ever encumbered the earth. He was a giant in stature--
insolent, rapacious, filthy; had the gall of a bullock with the
heart of an hyena and the brains of a peacock. He died, at
length, by dint of his own energies, which exhausted him.
Nevertheless, he had his uses, as everything has, however vile,
and taught mankind a lesson which to this day it is in no danger
of forgetting--never to run directly contrary to the natural
analogies. As for Republicanism, no analogy could be found for
it upon the face of the earth--unless we except the case of the
'prairie dogs', an exception which seems to demonstrate, if
anything, that democracy is a very admirable form of government--
for dogs.
 6.-- Last night had a fine view of Alpha Lyrae,
whose disk, through our captain's spy-glass, subtends an angle of
half a degree, looking very much as our sun does to the naked eye
on a misty day. Alpha Lyrae, although so much larger
than our sun, by the by, resembles him closely as regards its
spots, its atmosphere, and in many other particulars. It is only
within the last century, Pundit tells me, that the binary
relation existing between these two orbs began even to be
suspected. The evident motion of our system in the heavens was
(strange to say!) referred to an orbit about a prodigious star in
the centre of the galaxy. About this star, or at all events in
the centre of gravity common to all the globes of the Milky Way
and supposed to be near Alcyone in the Pleiades, every one of
these globes was declared to be revolving, our own performing the
circuit in a period of 117,000,000 of years! , with our
present lights, our vast telescopic improvements, and so forth,
of course find it difficult to comprehend of an
idea such as this. Its first propagator was one Mudler. He was
led, we must presume, to this wild hypothesis by mere analogy in
the first instance; but, this being the case, he should have at
least adhered to analogy in its development. A great central orb
, in fact, suggested: so far Mudler was consistent. This
central orb, however, dynamically, should have been greater than
all its surrounding orbs taken together. The question might then
have been asked--'Why do we not see it?'--, especially, who
occupy the mid region of the cluster--the very locality 
which, at least, must be situated this inconceivable central sun.
The astronomer, perhaps, at this point, took refuge in the
suggestion of non-luminosity; and here analogy was suddenly let
fall. But even admitting the central orb non-luminous, how did
he manage to explain its failure to be rendered visible by the
incalculable host of glorious suns glaring in all directions
about it? No doubt what he finally maintained was merely a
centre of gravity common to all the revolving orbs--but here
again analogy must have been let fall. Our system revolves, it
is true, about a common centre of gravity, but it does this in
connection with and in consequence of a material sun whose mass
more than counterbalances the rest of the system. The
mathematical circle is a curve composed of an infinity of
straight lines; but this idea of the circle--this idea of it
which, in regard to all earthly geometry, we consider as merely
the mathematical, in contra-distinction from the practical, idea-
-is, in sober fact, the conception which alone we
have any right to entertain in respect of those Titanic circles
with which we have to deal, at least in fancy, when we suppose
our system, with its fellows, revolving about a point in the
centre of the galaxy. Let the most vigorous of human
imaginations but attempt to take a single step towards the
comprehension of a circuit so unutterable! It would scarcely be
paradoxical to say that a flash of lightning itself, travelling
 upon the circumference of this inconceivable circle,
would still be travelling in a straight line. That
the path of our sun along such a circumference--that the
direction of our system in such an orbit--would, to any human
perception, deviate in the slightest degree from a straight line
even in a million of years, is a proposition not to be
entertained; and yet these ancient astronomers were absolutely
cajoled, it appears, into believing that a decisive curvature had
become apparent during the brief period of their astronomical
history--during the mere point--during the utter nothingness of
two or three thousand years! How incomprehensible that
considerations such as this did not at once indicate to them the
true state of affairs--that of the binary revolution of our sun
and Alpha Lyrae around a common centre of gravity!
 7.-- Continued last night our astronomical
amusements. Had a fine view of the five Neptunian asteroids, and
watched with much interest the putting up of a huge impost on a
couple of lintels in the new temple at Daphnis in the moon. It
was amusing to think that creatures so diminutive as the
lunarians, and bearing so little resemblance to humanity, yet
evinced a mechanical ingenuity so much superior to our own. One
finds it difficult, too, to conceive the vast masses, which these
people handle so easily, to be as light as our reason tells us
they actually are.
 8.-- Eureka! Pundit is in his glory. A balloon
from Kanadaw spoke us to-day and threw on board several late
papers; they contain some exceedingly curious information
relative to Kanawdian or rather to Amriccan antiquities. You
know, I presume, that labourers have for some months been
employed in preparing the ground for a new fountain at Paradise,
the emperor's principal pleasure garden. Paradise, it appears,
has been, speaking, an island time out of mind--
that is to say, its northern boundary was always (as far back as
any records extend) a rivulet, or rather a very narrow arm of the
sea. This arm was gradually widened until it attained its
present breadth--a mile. The whole length of the island is nine
miles; the breadth varies materially. The entire area (so Pundit
says) was, about eight hundred years ago, densely packed with
houses, some of them twenty storeys high; land (for some most
unaccountable reason) being considered as especially precious
just in this vicinity. The disastrous earthquake, however, of
the year 2050, so totally uprooted and overwhelmed the town (for
it was almost too large to be called a village) that the most
indefatigable of our antiquarians have never yet been able to
obtain from the site any sufficient date (in the shape of coins,
medals, or inscriptions) wherewith to build up even the ghost of
a theory concerning the manners, customs, etc. etc., of the
aboriginal inhabitants. Nearly all that we have hitherto known
of them is, that they were a portion of the Knickerbocker tribe
of savages infesting the continent at its first discovery by
Recorder Riker, a knight of the Golden Fleece. They were by no
means uncivilized, however, but cultivated various arts and even
sciences after a fashion of their own. It is related of them
that they were acute in many respects, but were oddly afflicted
with a monomania for building what, in the ancient Amriccan, was
denominated 'churches'--a kind of pagoda instituted for the
worship of two idols that went by the names of Wealth and
Fashion. In the end, it is said, the island became, nine-tenths
of it, church. The women, too, it appears, were oddly deformed
by a natural protuberance of the region just below the small of
the back--although, most unaccountably, this deformity was looked
upon altogether in the light of a beauty. One or two pictures of
these singular women have, in fact, been miraculously preserved.
They look very odd, --like something between a turkey-
cock and a dromedary.
Well, these few details are nearly all that have descended
to us respecting the ancient Knickerbockers. It seems, however,
that while digging in the centre of the emperor's garden (which,
you know, covers the whole island), some of the workmen unearthed
a cubical and evidently chiselled block of granite, weighing
several hundred pounds. It was in good preservation, having
received, apparently, little injury from the convulsion which
entombed it. On one of its surfaces was a marble slab with (only
think of it) <i an inscription--a legible inscription). Pundit
is in ecstasies. Upon detaching the slab, a cavity appeared,
containing a leaden box filled with various coins, a long scroll
of names, several documents which appear to resemble newspapers,
with other matters of intense interest to the antiquarian! There
can be no doubt that all these are genuine Amriccan relics
belonging to the tribe called Knickerbocker. The papers thrown
on board our balloon are filled with fac-similes of the coins,
MSS, typography, etc. etc. I copy for your amusement the
Knickerbocker inscription on the marble slab:--

THIS CORNER STONE OF A MONUMENT TO THE
MEMORY OF
GEORGE WASHINGTON
WAS LAID WITH APPROPRIATE CEREMONIES ON THE
19TH DAY OF OCTOBER, 1847,
THE ANNIVERSARY OF THE SURRENDER OF
LORD CORNWALLIS
TO GENERAL WASHINGTON AT YORKTOWN,
A.D. 1781,
UNDER THE AUSPICES OF THE
WASHINGTON MONUMENT ASSOCIATION OF THE
CITY OF NEW YORK.

This, as I give it, is a verbatim translation done by Pundit
himself, so there be no mistake about it. From the few
words thus preserved, we glean several important items of
knowledge, not the least interesting of which is the fact that a
thousand years ago monuments had fallen into disuse--
as was all very proper--the people contenting themselves, as we
do now, with a mere indication of the design to erect a monument
at some future time; a corner-stone being cautiously laid by
itself 'solitary and alone' (excuse me for quoting the great
Amriccan poet Benton!) as a guarantee of the magnanimous . We ascertain, too, very distinctly, from this
admirable inscription, the how, as well as the where and the
what, of the great surrender in question. As to the ,
it was Yorktown (wherever that was), and as to the , it
was General Cornwallis (no doubt some wealthy dealer in corn).
 was surrendered. The inscription commemorates the
surrender of--what?--why, 'of Lord Cornwallis'. The only
question is, what could the savages wish him surrendered for.
But when we remember that these savages were undoubtedly
cannibals, we are led to the conclusion that they intended him
for sausage. As to the of the surrender, no language
could be more explicit. Lord Cornwallis was surrendered (for
sausage) 'under the auspices of the Washington Monument
Association'--no doubt a charitable institution for the
depositing of cornerstones.-- But, heaven bless me! what is the
matter? Ah! I see--the balloon has collapsed, and we shall have
a tumble into the sea. I have, therefore, only time enough to
add that, from a hasty inspection of fac-similes of newspapers,
etc., I find that great men in those days among the
Amriccans were one John, a smith, and one Zacchary, a tailor.
Good-bye, until I see you again. Whether you ever get this
letter or not is a point of little importance, as I write
altogether for my own amusement. I shall cork the MS up in a
bottle, however, and throw it into the sea.
Yours everlastingly,
PUNDITA