The night may be moonlit, starry, glum as a ghoul, dark as black bullocks of Galloway, or terrible with thunder-bursts and drenching rains and blowing of great guns. Valor is an indeterminate essence; at times the essence will ooze; much depends on the status; few men are supremely valorous in the dark.
Plato considered that woman was intended to do the same things as man, only not so well. It is currently suspected, however, that women can fight better than their brothers in that grewsome darkest hour which just precedes the dawn, when so many attacks are planned which mostly fail. Exceptions should possibly be noted in favor of the emancipated female trotting out of her class; specially against the timid man who has been dragged all night over loose stones, at the tail of a wild nightmare.
Sleep comes at last, and the camp sounds lull, not startle; peaceful, innocent, harmless as the fresh-laid humorist pleading for a little more civilization among the higher classes. Soporific is the sentry's slow, reluctant Amsterdam tramp, as he strides, bemoiled by the long day's detritus, wrapped mostly in the wailing winds; also the electric interurban symphony of snorings manifold, which care not one coreless clam what nationality stands guard to-night; the weird signals of the fond melodious mule struggling with anchylosis of thoracic articulation, and betimes bursting into an effort that saturates seven cubic miles of atmosphere with familiar mule music in seventeen seconds; the melancholy squeak of a belated sutler's wagon, grinding out its assent to the maxim that a linch-pin in time saves an axle; the hoot of a discontented owl in branches not remote; the howl of expostulatory cur in distant farm-yard; the intercepted shriek of far off poultry, prey of some army prowler who strews the ground with severed heads and hot red spurts of gore.
Soporific is all this medley of celluloid resonance; softer than the first symptoms of velvety resistance on a youth's lip; smoother than the etiquette of a square meal at a round-table; provocative all of serenest, soundest sleep, until joyless reveille shall come, summoning from iridescent dreams to another day of inglorious unromantic toiling—double column at half distance and then double distance on half rations.
Through long, drowsy summer afternoons comes luscious deshabille of relaxation, born of an assured half-week's unthreatened encampment serenity. Then the recherché loungers in the Shelter Tent, clinking their useless double-eagles together with capitalistic nonchalance, revel in tutti-frutti visions of banished splendors and foresworn delights. Those bright single-gold-standard days haunt us still, with the persistence of a sixty winter damsel in her frosty bloom. The cribbed and coffined quarters expand into peopled vistas of epicurean magnificence, elusive and deceptive as a tax on dinner pails. Therein the mirage of gorgeous furnishings alternates or mingles with the phantasm of delicate potables, with a bewildering miscellaneousness that recalls Agassiz's dictum on the impossibility of reconciling American stratifications.
Throw physic to the dogs—they need thinning out anyhow, but preserve your hallucinations; four generations of gentility are required to produce a boy without freckles. P. S. Give the negro a chance! Eighty generations barely sufficed to evolve a white man capable of inventing the postage stamp. Just four hundred years were occupied by the whites in conquering the Indians, with the powerful aid of rum, gunpowder and Indian agents.
As we remarked, the furnishings of these visions were extremely gorgeous. Cashmere, Bokarra and Khivan rugs bespread the marqueterie floors. Also, delicate the potables. Ragouts, chow-chow, dinde glacé, truffles, soquille, sorbot, terrapin, sauterne, cognac and extra dry cover the beckoning tables; nectar, nectar everywhere and every drop imbibable. Imported, perhaps, through Signor Sp. Frumenti, of Genoa.
Behold priceless bijoux of Louis Quinze,—buhl, Sèvres, Limoges, Dalton, and Royal Vienna; treasures of ormolu and ivory, and Carrara; wonders of faience and Satsuma; quaint carvings from Padua, Tokio, Delhi and Antwerp, in ebony or sandal or teak or immemorial oak! All for ornament rather than utility, like the ears of a mule which have been stationed too far in front for wings, and too high up for fly-scares. Here are poems in brass, anthems in eternal bronze, pastorals in Dresden, mythologies in the grinning idols of Cathay, miracles in Gobelin and Daubisson; relics of the by-flown, fly-blown past, before the great, red dragon of Wall street had been hatched and hated.
There are scimiter and falchion from the days of Lionheart, inwrought with golden arabesque by fezzed wizards in Teheran. There are poniards, it may be, reviving proud, glad, gladiatorial days, when men were muscled like the brawny, aged hen. They fought with bloody bludgeons long and well; or with sharp rapier carved the lion's liver from his agile frame, while smiling beauty munched the Roman caramel and saw with tearless lid the brave ones sink beneath hard blows more deadly than the modern pie.
Here swing hangings more valued than jewels; silk woven in the caliphs' harems; yellowing marvels of Chantilly; glowing glories of Corot and Daubigny, Gérôme, Vibert, Meissonier, Millais or Rembrandt—unequaled as to flesh tints; superior even to most chromos.