could read the letters at the head of the sheet, he would see they were
Fly-Paper.--So with us, when, in our waking misery, we try to think we
dream! Perhaps very young persons may not understand this; as we grow
older, our waking and dreaming life run more and more into each other.

Another symptom of our excited condition is seen in the breaking up of
old habits. The newspaper is as imperious as a Russian Ukase; it will be
had, and it will be read. To this all else must give place. If we must
go out at unusual hours to get it, we shall go, in spite of after-dinner
nap or evening somnolence. If it finds us in company, it will not stand
on ceremony, but cuts short the compliment and the story by the divine
right of its telegraphic dispatches.

War is a very old story, but it is a new one to this generation of
Americans. Our own nearest relation in the ascending line remembers the
Revolution well. How should she forget it? Did she not lose her doll,
which was left behind, when she was carried out of Boston, about that
time growing uncomfortable by reason of cannon-balls dropping in from the
neighboring heights at all hours,--in token of which see the tower of
Brattle Street Church at this very day? War in her memory means '76. As
for the brush of 1812, "we did not think much about that"; and everybody
knows that the Mexican business did not concern us much, except in its
political relations. No! war is a new thing to all of us who are not in
the last quarter of their century. We are learning many strange matters
from our fresh experience. And besides, there are new conditions of
existence which make war as it is with us very different from war as it
has been.

The first and obvious difference consists in the fact that the whole
nation is now penetrated by the ramifications of a network of iron nerves