Salmagundi; or, The whim-whams and opinions of Launcelot Langstaff, esq. [pseud.] and others. By William Irving, James Kirke Paulding and Washington Irving. Printed from the original ed., with a preface and notes by Evert A. Duyckinck.

THE BATTERY. 97
of fruit and flower, into a desert, frightful, solitary, and forlorn;
who, with the wave of his wand could transform even the
disciples of Mahomet into grinning apes and chattering monkeys.
Surely, thought I to myself this morning, the dreadful Muley
has been exercising his infernal enchantments on these unhappy
infidels. Listen, oh Abdallah, and wonder! Last night I
committed myself to tranquil slumber, encompassed with all the
monotonous tokens of peace, and this morning I awoke enveloped
in the noise, the bustle, the clangor, and the shouts of war.
Everything was changed, as if by magic. An immense army
had sprung up, like mushrooms, in a night, and all the cobblers,
tailors, and tinkers of the city had mounted the nodding plume;
had become in the twinkling of an eye, helmeted heroes and
war-worn veterans.
Alarmed at the beating of drums, the braying of trumpets,
and the shouting of the multitude, I dressed myself in haste,
sallied forth, and followed a prodigious crowd of people to a
place called the Battery. This is so denominated, I am told,
from having once been defended with formidable wooden bulwarks, which in the course of a hard winter were thriftily pulled
to pieces by an economic corporation, to be distributed for firewood among the poor; this was done at the hint of a cunning
old engineer, who assured them it was the only way in which
their fortifications would ever be able to keep up a warm fire.
ECONOMY, my friend, is the watch-word of this nation; I have
been studying for a month past to divine its meaning, but truly
am as much perplexed as ever. It is a kind of national starvation; an experiment how many comforts and necessaries the
body politic can be deprived of before it perishes. It has
already arrived to a lamentable degree of debility, and promises
to share the fate of the Arabian philosopher, who proved that
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