Friday, March 30, 2007

Some currently cool phrases

Weekly Cool Phrases -- From ngriffin

Be careful what you wish for, your dreams may come true.
Get up on this!
Nothing lasts forever.
Remember my name - I'll have you screaming it later!
I used to have an open mind but my brains kept falling out.
If you were a booger I'd pick you first!
It is what it is..........
Let's play make believe.......
There isn't any fire. I'm just running from the flame.
How ya doin!?
Everything must change.
Looking like a lollipop waiting on a lick.
Keep it between the ditches!
Get down. Girl go head. Get down!
I wish you would just.........Puff Away!! Poof!
Now that's why they call me Big Poppa!!
Always remember: Sometimes forever comes too soon.
I'm not that lonely yet!
If you’re scared say your scared, and jump in my pocket!
Regret this!!
And the best of all (added by Aimee DuPré) “I want to check you for ticks!”

Witty definitions

Abstinence - is defined as a couple who don’t drink, don’t smoke and have adopted children.
Accident - A condition where presence of mind is good ; but absence of body is better.
Acquaintance : A person whom we know well enough to borrow from but not well enough to lend to
Adolescents - Children old enough to dress themselves if they could just remember where they last saw their clothes.
Advice - That the wise do not need and the fools do not take.
Age - A very high price to pay for maturity.
Alchoholic - A guy you don’t like who drinks as much as you do.
Anatomy - Something everybody has, but it looks better on a girl.
Archeologist - One who has a career always in ruins.
Atheist - A person who has no invisible means of support.
Baby - A loud noise at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other.
Bachelor - A man who never makes the same mistake once.- A person who doesn’t have to leave the party when he starts to have fun.- A man who has been lucky in love.- One who is foot loose and fiance free.
Bank - A place where they rent you an Umbrella in fair weather and ask it back when it begins to rain.- A place that will lend you money if you can prove that you dont need it.
Bore - Somebody who when you ask him how he is, describes it.
Brain - The apparatus with which we think we think.
Calamity - These are of two kinds ones that are misfortune to ourselves and good fortune to others.
Celebrity - A personality who works very hard all his life to become known, then wears dark glasses to avoid being recognized.
Collaboration - The process where two people create something which each thinks is his own
College - A fountain of knowledge where everyone goes to drink.
Compliment - A verbal sunshine.
Conclusion - A place were you get tired of thinking.
Conference - A gathering of important people who singly can do nothing but together can decide that nothing can be done.
Cooperation - An exchange between a man and a woman in which she coos and he operates.
Dancing - A perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire.
Democracy - A form of religion where jackals are worshiped by jackasses.
Diplomat - A person who always remembers a girls birthday but never her age.
Drive in Movie - Wall to wall car petting.
Economy - Art of cutting down other peoples age.
Egotist- Someone who is always me-deep in conversation.
ETC. - A three lettered word used by more than a few to make people think that they know more than they do.
Experience - The wonderful knowledge that enables you to recognize a mistake when you make it again
Fad - Something that goes in one era and out in the other.
Fame - When you dominate the conversation and you are not there.
Familiarity - Something that breeds contempt and children.
Fashion - Something that goes in one year and out the other.
Flirtation - Attention without intention.
Friendship - Is more tragic than love It lasts longer.
Gambling - The sure way of getting nothing from something.
Gardener - Someone who thinks that what goes down must come up.
Genius - One who can do anything except make a living.
Good Housekeeper - Woman every time she gets divorced, keeps the house.
Gossip - When you hear something you like about someone you dont.
Happiness - The pursuit of something not the catching of it. ( have you ever chased the last bus on a rainy night?)- Is finding the owner of a lost bikini.
Happy married couple - Husband out with another man’s wife.
Heaven - Where the Englishmen are the policemen, The Germans are the engineers, The Italians are the lovers, The Swiss are the organisers and the french are the cooks
- Where you have an American salary, a Chinese cook, an English home, and a Japanese wife.
Hell - Where the Germans are the policemen, the English are the cooks, the French are the engineers, the Italians are the organisers and the Swiss are the lovers.
- Where you have a Chinese salary, a japanese home, an English cook and an American wife.
Hollywood - A place where they shoot too many pictures but not enough actors
Humility - A quality that disappears the moment you think you have it.
Ideal wife - A beautiful sex starved deaf mute who owns a liquor store.
Idealist - One who tries to keep politics out of politics.
Income - Something you cannot live without or within
Intelligent girl - One who can think up excuses that her boyfriends wife will believe.
Intoxication - The physical state in which one feels sophisticated without being able to pronounce it.
Laughter - A tranquilizer with no side effects.
Logic - It is the art of going wrong with confidence.
Love - It is a temporary insanity curable by marriage.- A delusion that one woman differs from the other.
Love letters - State of the heart correspondence
Man - A creature made at the end of the week when God was tired.- Simple things that can survive a week end with just three things - Beer, Boxer shorts and batteries for their remote.- A creature of supreme intelligence who elects creatures of inferior intelligence to govern him.
Majority - A large group of people who have gotten tired of thinking and have decided to accept somebody else’s opinion.
Marriage - A community consisting of a master a mistress and two slaves making in all two.- Is give and take, you better give it to her or she’ll take it anyway- Is a process of finding out what sort of a guy your wife would have preferred to marry.
Martyrdom - The only way a man can become famous without ability.
Memory - What tells a man that her birthday was yesterday.
Metallurgist - A person who can differentiate a virgin metal from a common ore.
Middle age - When your narrow waist and your broader mind exchange places.
Mother - Someone who thinks that girls who go after her son are brazen and the ones who don’t are stupid.
Necessity - Almost any luxury you see in the house of a neighbour.
Neurotic - Someone who worries about things that didnt happen in the past instead of worring about something that wont happen in the future, like normal people.
Parents - People who bear infants, bore teenagers and board newlyweds.
Paristroika - Economic restructuring of France
Patriot - The fellow who gets a parking ticket and rejoices that the system works.
Pedestrian - One who has 3 cars, a wife and 2 teenage kids.
Pessimist - Someone who’s never happy unless he’s miserable.- Someone who wears a suspenders as well as a belt.- One who would complain about the noise if opportunity knocked.
Petting party - An affair that lasts until someone gives in, gives up or gives out.
Politics - Is a combination of two words Poly - meaning Many and Tics - a blood sucking insect.
Politician - A man who approaches every question with an open mouth.
Prayer - Om work
Proposal - A proposition that lost its nerve.
Public Opinion - what people think people think
Sailor - One who makes his living on water but never touches it on shore.
Senior citizen - One who doesn’t miss the good old days as much as he misses the good old nights
Sex - An emotion in motion.
Smile - A curve that sets many things straight.
Sympathy - What one woman offers another in exchange for the details.
Tack - Intelligence of the heart.
Teacher - He who can does. He who cannot teaches.
Time - That which man is always trying to kill but which ends up killing him.
Truth - Something stranger than fiction, but not as popular.
Ulcers - Something you get not from what you eat but from whats eating you.
Vacation - When you spend thousands of rupees to see what rain looks like in different parts of the world.
Vision - The art of seeing things invisible - Jonathan Swift. Well proportioned girl - One with a narrow waist and a broad mind
Wrinkles - What all men have in their pants that no woman wants.

This is so funny -- writers will know what I mean

June 20, 2006

Mars and Venus redux

Here's a prime example of "Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus" offered by an English professor with the University of Phoenix.

The professor told his class one day: "Today we will experiment with a new form called the tandem story. The process is simple. Each person will pair off with the person sitting to his or her immediate right. As homework tonight, one of you will write the first paragraph of a short story. You will e-mail your partner that paragraph and send a copy to me. The partner will read the first paragraph and then add another paragraph to the story and send it back, also sending a copy to me. The first person will then add a third paragraph, and so on back and forth.
"Remember to re-read what has been written each time in order to keep the story coherent. There is to be absolutely NO talking outside of the e-mails and anything you wish to say must be written in the e-mail. The story is over when both agree a conclusion has been reached."
The following was actually turned in by two of his English students: Rebecca and Gary.
THE STORY: (first paragraph by Rebecca)At first, Laurie couldn't decide which kind of tea she wanted. The chamomile, which used to be her favorite for lazy evenings at home, now reminded her too much of Carl, who once said, in happier times, that he liked chamomile. But she felt she must now, at all costs, keep her mind off Carl. His possessiveness was suffocating, and if she thought about him too much her asthma started acting up again. So chamomile was out of the question.
(second paragraph by Gary)Meanwhile, Advance Sergeant Carl Harris, leader of the attack squadron now in orbit over Skylon 4, had more important things to think about than the neuroses of an air-headed asthmatic bimbo named Laurie with whom he had spent one sweaty night over a year ago. "A.S. Harris to Geostation 17," he said into his transgalactic communicator. "Polar orbit established. No sign of resistance so far..." But before he could sign off a bluish particle beam flashed out of nowhere and blasted a hole through his ship's cargo bay. The jolt from the direct hit sent him flying out of his seat and across the cockpit.
(Rebecca)He bumped his head and died almost immediately, but not before he felt one last pang of regret for psychically brutalizing the one woman who had ever had feelings for him. Soon afterwards, Earth stopped its pointless hostilities towards the peaceful farmers of Skylon 4. "Congress Passes Law Permanently Abolishing War and Space Travel," Laurie read in her newspaper one morning. The news simultaneously excited her and bored her. She stared out the window, dreaming of her youth, when the days had passed unhurriedly and carefree, with no newspaper to read, no television to distract her from her sense of innocent wonder at all the beautiful things around her. "Why must on lose one's innocence to become a woman?" she pondered wistfully.
(Gary)Little did she know, but she had less than 10 seconds to live. Thousands of miles above the city, the Anu'udrian mothership launched the first of its lithium fusion missiles. The dim-witted wimpy peaceniks who pushed the Unilateral Aerospace disarmament Treaty through the congress had left Earth a defenseless target for the hostile alien empires who were determined to destroy the human race. Within two hours after the passage of the treaty the Anu'udrian ships were on course for Earth, carrying enough firepower to pulverize the entire planet. With no one to stop them, they swiftly initiated their diabolical plan. The lithium fusion missile entered the atmosphere unimpeded. The President, in his top-secret mobile submarine headquarters on the ocean floor off the coast of Guam, felt the inconceivably massive explosion, which vaporized poor, stupid, Laurie and 85 million other Americans. The President slammed his fist on the conference table. "We can't allow this! I'm going to veto that treaty! Let's blow 'em out of the sky!"
(Rebecca)This is absurd. I refuse to continue this mockery of literature. My writing partner is a violent, chauvinistic semi-literate adolescent.
(Gary)Yeah? Well, my writing partner is a self-centered tedious neurotic whose attempts at writing are the literary equivalent of Valium. "Oh, shall I have chamomile tea? Or shall I have some other sort of F--KING TEA??? Oh no, what am I to do? I'm such an air-headed bimbo who reads too many Danielle Steele novels!"
(Rebecca)Asshole.
(Gary)Bitch.
(Rebecca)F__K YOU - YOU NEANDERTHAL!
(Gary)Go drink some tea - whore.
(TEACHER)A+ - I really liked this one.

Posted by joke du jour at 06:00 PM Comments (0) TrackBack

Have you read these banned books?

I READ BANNED BOOKS

List of the top 110 banned books. Bold the ones you've read. Italicize the ones you've read part of. Underline the ones you specifically want to read (at least some of). Read more. Convince others to read some.

#1 The Bible
#2 Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
#3 Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
#4 The Qur'an
#5 Arabian Nights
#6 Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
#7 Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
#8 Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
#9 Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
#10 Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
#11 The Prince by Niccoli Machiavelli
#12 Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
#13 Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
#14 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
#15 Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
#16 Les Misrables by Victor Hugo
#17 Dracula by Bram Stoker
#18 Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin
#19 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
#20 Essays by Michel de Montaigne
#21 Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
#22 History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
#23 Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
#24 Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
#25 Ulysses by James Joyce
#26 Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
27 Animal Farm by George Orwell
#28 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
#29 Candide by Voltaire
#30 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
#31 Analects by Confucius
#32 Dubliners by James Joyce
#33 Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
#34 Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
#35 Red and the Black by Stendhal
#36 Das Capital by Karl Marx
#37 Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire
#38 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
#39 Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence
#40 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
#41 Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
#42 Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
#43 The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
#44 All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
#45 Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx
#46 Lord of the Flies by William Golding
#47 Diary by Samuel Pepys
#48 Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
#49 Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
#50 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
#51 Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
#52 Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
#53 One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
#54 Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus
#55 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
#56 Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X
#57 Color Purple by Alice Walker
#58 Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
#59 Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke
#60 Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
#61 Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
#62 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#63 East of Eden by John Steinbeck
#64 Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
#65 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
#66 Confessions by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#67 Gargantua and Pantagruel by Francois Rabelais
#68 Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
#69 The Talmud
#70 Social Contract by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#71 Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
#72 Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
#73 American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
#74 Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
#75 Separate Peace by John Knowles
#76 Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
#77 Red Pony by John Steinbeck
#78 Popol Vuh
#79 Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith
#80 Satyricon by Petronius
#81 James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
#82 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
#83 Black Boy by Richard Wright
#84 Spirit of the Laws by Charles de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu
#85 Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
#86 Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
#87 Metaphysics by Aristotle
#88 Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
#89 Institutes of the Christian Religion by Jean Calvin
#90 Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse
#91 Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
#92 Sanctuary by William Faulkner
#93 As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
#94 Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin
#95 Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig
#96 Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
#97 General Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud
#98 Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
#99 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Alexander Brown
#100 Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
#101 Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest J. Gaines
#102 Emile Jean by Jacques Rousseau
#103 Nana by Emile Zola
#104 Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
#105 Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
#106 Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#107 Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
#108 Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck
#109 Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark
#110 Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

posted by Leslie Shelor 8:01 PM Comments (3)
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Wednesday, March 28, 2007

I Wish I Knew Your Name by Roberto J. Prinselaar

Monday, 12 March 2007

I Wish I Knew Your Name
by Roberto J. Prinselaar

I knew you once upon a time
Like I knew many more
I think I knew your last name
Before I learned the score
You worked and slept alongside of me
A member of the crew
Not knowing you would soon be gone
Your life would soon be through
You did your duty on the gun
You were good at what you did
No one would think by watching you
That you were just a kid
I really don't know what it was
That hit you that day
No time to stop, we carried on
No one knew what to say
Your place was filled by another kid
Who looked about the same
And now I wish I knew you then
I wish I knew your name

Contributed by Bill Faith on March 12, 2007 at 01:42 AM in Bob Prinselaar, Poetry, The American Warrior, US Navy Permalink Comments (0) TrackBack

story starters

Writing guidelines
Sample story starters:
Sample settings:
Sample words:
-- He burst into the room-- She took the suitcase-- The smell of rain
-- at a hide-away-- on a city street-- at a mansion
-- palm tree-- redhead-- echo

Sample recipe:
1 starter.
5 words.
A story of your life where all facts are true except one, which is totally made up.

Historical information

130 years ago our country was establishing its pioneer roots. The vast grassland west of the great Mississippi River was being built into cattle growing country. The cowboy, the horseman, would begin to create history. The man and his handshake, his word was his bond, was how an honorable man ran the business of his life. He was a man that lived and worked on the land. He didn't know it at the time, but the cowboy was to become a hero to a growing nation.

During the Victorian Period, the hair receiver was commonly found on a woman’s vanity.After brushing her hair, she would remove the hair from the brush place it through the opening of the receiver for storage.Once enough hair had accumulated, it could be used to construct rats, or could be woven or plaited and put into lockets, left visible through cut-glass windows of a brooch or even made into watch chains bracelets or jewelry. -- From the Hair Archives
July 30, 2006 at 09:14 PM Permalink Comments (9) TrackBack (0)

October 13, 1870
OBITUARY -- Gen. Robert E. Lee
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
Intelligence was received last evening of the death at Lexington, Va., Of Gen. Robert E. Lee, the most famous of the officers whose celebrity was gained in the service of the Southern Confederacy during the late terrible rebellion. A report was received some days ago that he had been smitten with paralysis, but this was denied, and though it was admitted that he was seriously ill, hopes of his speedy recovery seem to have been entertained by his friends. Within the last two or three days his symptoms had taken an unfavorable turn, and he expired at 91/2 o'clock yesterday morning of congestion of the brain, at the age of sixty-three years, eight months and twenty-three days.
Robert Edmund Lee was the son of Gen. Henry Lee, the friend of Washington, and a representative of one of the wealthiest and most respected families of Virginia. Born in January, 1807, he grew up amid all the advantages which wealth and family position could give in a republican land, and received the best education afforded by the institutions of his native State. Having inherited a taste for military studies, and an ambition for military achievements, he entered the National Academy at West Point in 1825, and graduated in 1829, the second in scholarship in his class. He was at once commissioned Second Lieutenant of engineers, and in 1835 acted as assistant astronomer in drawing the boundary line between the States of Michigan and Ohio. In the following year he was promoted to the grade of First Lieutenant, and in 1836 received a Captain's commission. One the breaking out of the war with Mexico he was made Chief-Engineer of the army under the command of Gen. Wool. After the battle of Cerro Gordo, in April, 1847, in which he distinguished himself by his gallant conduct, he was immediately promoted to the rank of Major. He displayed equal skill and bravery at Contreras, Cherubusco and Chapultepec, and in the battle at the last-mentioned place received a severe wound. His admirable conduct throughout this struggle was rewarded before its close with the commission of a Lieutenant-Colonel and the brevet title of Colonel. In 1852 he was appointed to the responsible position of Superintendent of the Military Academy at West Point, which he retained until 1855. On retiring from the charge of this institution he was made Lieutenant-Colonel of the Second Calvary, and on the 16th of March, 1861, received the commission of Colonel of the First Calvary.
Thus far the career of Col. Lee had been one of honor and the highest promise. In every service which had been entrusted to his hands he had proved efficient, prompt and faithful, and his merits had always been readily acknowledged and rewarded by promotion. He was regarded by his superior officers as one of the most brilliant and promising men in the army of the United States. His personal integrity was well known, and his loyalty and patriotism was not doubted. Indeed, it was in view of the menaces of treason and the dangers which threatened the Union that he had received his last promotion, but he seems to have been thoroughly imbued with that pernicious doctrine that his first and highest allegiance was due to the State of his birth. When Virginia joined the ill-fated movement of secession from the Union, he immediately threw up his commission in the Federal Army and offered his sword to the newly formed Confederacy. He took this step, protesting his own attachment to the Union, but declaring that his sense of duty would never permit him to "raise his hand against his relatives, his children, and his home." In his farewell letter to Gen. Scott, he spoke of the struggle which this step had cost him, and his wife declared that he "wept tears of blood over this terrible war." There are probably few who doubt the sincerity of his protestation, but thousands have regretted, and his best friends will ever have to regret, the error of judgment, the false conception of the allegiance due to his Government and his country, which led one so rarely gifted to cast his lot with traitors, and devote his splendid talents to the execution of a wicked plot to tear asunder and ruin the Republic in whose service his life had hitherto been spent.
He resigned his commission on the 25th of April, 1861, and immediately betook himself to Richmond, where he was received with open arms and put in command of all the forces of Virginia by Gov. Letcher. On the 10th of May he received the commission of a Major-General in the army of the Confederate States, retaining the command in Virginia, and was soon after promoted to the rank of General in the regular army. He first took the field in the mountainous region of Western Virginia, where he met with many difficulties, and was defeated at Greenbrier by Gen. J. J. Reynolds on the 3d of October, 1861. He was subsequently sent to take command of the Department of the South Atlantic Coast, but after the disabling of Gen. Joseph E. Johnston at the battle of Fair Oaks, in the Spring of 1862, he was recalled to Virginia, and placed at the head of the forces defending the capital, which he led through the remainder of the campaign of the Chickahominy. He engaged with the Army of the Potomac under his old companion-in- arms, Gen. McClellan, and drove it back to the Rappahannock. He afterward, in August, 1862 attacked the Army of Virginia, under Gen. Pope, and after driving it back to Washington, crossed the Potomac into Maryland, where he issued a proclamation calling upon the inhabitants to enlist under his triumphant banners. Meantime McClellan gathered a new army from the broken remnants of his former forces, and met Lee at Hagerstown, and, after a battle of two days, compelled him to retreat. Reinforced by "Stonewall" Jackson, on the 16th of September, he turned to renew the battle, but after two days of terrible fighting at Sharpsburg and Antietam, was driven from the soil of Maryland. Retiring beyond the Rappahannock, he took up his position at Fredericksburg, where he was attacked, on the 13th of December, by Gen. Burnside, whom he drove back with terrible slaughter. He met with the same success in May, 1868, when attacked by Hooker, at Chancellorsville. Encouraged by these victories, in the ensuing Summer he determined to make a bold invasion into the territory of the North. He met Gen. Meade at Gettysburg, Penn., on the 1st of July, 1863, and after one of the most terrible and destructive battles of modern times, was driven from Northern soil. Soon after this, a new character appeared on the battle-fields of Virginia, and Gen. Lee found it expedient to gather his forces for the defense of the Confederate capital against the determined onslaughts of Gen. Grant. In the Spring and Summer of 1864 that indomitable soldier gradually inclosed the City of Richmond as with a girdle of iron, which he drew closer and closer with irresistible energy and inexorable determination, repulsing the rebel forces whenever they ventured to make an attack, which they did several times with considerable vigor. In this difficult position, holding the citadel of the Confederacy, and charged with its hopes and destinies, Lee was made Commander-in-Chief of the armies of the South. He held out until the Spring of 1865, vainly endeavoring to gather the broken forces of the Confederacy, and break asunder the terrible line which was closing around them. After a desperate and final effort at Burkesville, on the 9th of April, 1865, he was compelled to acknowledge his defeat, and surrendered his sword to Gen. Grant on the generous terms which were dictated by that great soldier. Lee retired under his parole to Weldon, and soon after made a formal submission to the Federal Government. Subsequently, by an official clemency, which is probably without a parallel in the history of the world, he was formally pardoned for the active and effective part he had taken in the mad effort of the Southern States to break up the Union and destroy the Government. Not long after his surrender he was invited to become the President of Washington University, at Lexington, Va., and was installed in that position on the 2d of October, 1865. Since that time he has devoted himself to the interests of that institution, keeping so far as possible aloof from public notice, and by his unobtrusive modesty and purity of life, has won the respect even of those who most bitterly deplore and reprobate his course in the rebellion.