Thus the irony of his fortune was more bitter than the jollity of a wake, with the corpse lying in state next door. While popular articles were quickly sold or stolen, the residuary stuff, howling abominations which none would buy or steal, lingered flyblown or fermenting. They were satirized and flouted by the dullest varlets in the regiment, who were notably afflicted with Ananias-and-Sapphira paresis, and to whom life's solemnest solemnities were a grimace and a grin. 'Tis ever thus, for human nature has been the same since the earliest ages began developing a monogram mania, when the sons of the stars first fascinated the daughters of men. Every true and honorable mob always holds in scornful contempt each simplest symbol of constituted authority, especially when constituted by itself. Even so, all genuine soldiers felt obliged to fleer and jeer at everything hidden or concealed in that cavern of despair wherein our hero reigned. They gave him the marble heart in the loud three-em dash newspaper style of emphasis. They swore by the dorsal fins of a planked white fish that he was a paroxysmal, flamboyant fraud, and showered on him weird variations of the standard oriental malediction; may his countenance be inverted diagonal-wise, and donkeys browse on his grandmother's grave! They floated him to perdition hourly on the brimstone vapors of their anathema, and soon beckoned him back again in the renaissance of their whetted appetite. Then he assumed a fictitious importance, sufficient indeed in more recent times to have almost entitled him to arrive at a New York hotel.
Probably no Sutler's stock was ever submitted to the critical and crucial operation of an inventory, presided over by an expert accountant's freshly laundered mustache, and cold, cruel, thin-lipped smile. The variety of such an inventory would be as attractive as that of the village landlord's menu—ram, lamb, sheep and mutton. Its metaphysics would be unique as a bi-metallic understudy; its mathematics only less recondite than a census of the baccilli encysted in the buzzard's beak on a standard dollar, mintage of 'eighty-one. An exhaustive attempt, at the present day, to remedy this omission would certainly involve serious risk of undue spiritual exhilaration and intellectual intoxication. But a partial list, achieved at any specified stage of a vigorous campaign, would have read something like this:
Wooden combs and Mexican spurs.
Gutta-percha bivalves (cove).
Pretzels—prophetic of the hard, hard times which marked an era of Hoke Smith and Dink Botts statesmanship.
Effete cigars, bunch-grass filling, wrapped in genuine Havana onion leaves at Wethersfield, in the state of Connecticut.
Plug tobacco advanced in ossification.
Smoking ditto, premonitory of asbestos; infinite in capacity for provocation; imitating in incombustibility the sullen defiance of a dead, cold epigram.
Epsom salts.
Smoked herring, also salt.