It is humiliating to be obliged to tell what followed.  The heroism of the Guard was rewarded by such treatment as we blush to record.  Upon their return to St. Louis, rations and forage were denied them, the men were compelled to wear the clothing soiled and torn in battle, they were promptly disbanded, and the officers retired from service.  The swords which pricked the clouds and let the joyful sunshine of victory into the darkness of constant defeat are now idle.  But the fame of the Guard is secure.  Out from that fiery baptism they came children of the nation, and American song and story will carry their heroic triumph down to the latest generation.

MASON AND SLIDELL:  A YANKEE IDYLL.

To the Editors of the ATLANTIC MONTHLY.

Jaalam, 6th Jan., 1862.

GENTLEMEN,—­I was highly gratified by the insertion of a portion of my letter in the last number of your valuable and entertaining Miscellany, though in a type which rendered its substance inaccessible even to the beautiful new spectacles presented to me by a Committee of the Parish on New-Year’s Day.  I trust that I was able to bear your very considerable abridgment of my lucubrations with a spirit becoming a Christian.  My third grand-daughter, Rebekah, aged fourteen years, and whom I have trained to read slowly and with proper emphasis, (a practice too much neglected in our modern systems of education,) read aloud to me the excellent essay upon “Old Age,” the authour of which I cannot help suspecting to be a young man who has never yet known what it was to have snow (canities morosa) upon his own roof. Dissolve frigus, large super foco ligna reponens, is a rule for the young, whose wood-pile is yet abundant for such cheerful lenitives.  A good life behind him is the best thing to keep an old man’s shoulders from shivering at every breath of sorrow or ill-fortune.  But methinks it were easier for an old man to feel the disadvantages of youth than the advantages of age.  Of these latter I reckon one of the chiefest to be this:  that we attach a less inordinate value to our own productions, and, distrusting daily more and more our own wisdom, (with the conceit whereof at twenty we wrap ourselves away from knowledge as with a garment,) do reconcile ourselves with the wisdom of God.  I could have wished, indeed, that room might have been made for the residue of the anecdote relating to Deacon Tinkham, which would not only have gratified a natural curiosity on the part of the publick, (as I have reason to know from several letters of inquiry already received,) but would also, as I think, have largely increased the circulation of your Magazine in this town. Nihil humani alienum, there is a curiosity about the affairs of our neighbours which is not only pardonable, but even commendable.  But I shall abide a more fitting season.