Friend Johnston: Your letter, written some six weeks since,2Open page was received in due course, and also the paper with the parody. It is true, as suggested it might be, that I have never seen Poe's ``Raven'';3Open page and I very well know that a parody is almost entirely dependent for its interest upon the reader's acquaintance with the original. Still there is enough in the polecat, self-considered, to afford one several hearty laughs. I think four or five of the last stanzas are decidedly funny, particularly where Jeremiah ``scrubbed and washed, and prayed and fasted.''
I have not your letter now before me; but, from memory, I