Ah, yes! Roast venison, fried chicken, stuffed oysters, broiled lobster, sausage with sauerkraut, beefsteak and onions on the half shell. The mills of the cooks grind slowly, but they grind, even though their recipes be less intelligible than the personal recollections of a giraffe.
All these things float and allure and dazzle and tempt in the soaring fancy of the dilettante militant, who is lifted from a deep dark Hamlet melancholy to semi-celestial altitudes. But a drum-tap or a horse-neigh brings him down with a dull thud to the cramped coarse environment where he is tethered like an uneasy Indian restricted to a mental reservation. Blessed is the voluptuousness of reverie; blessed and cheap as an expectant clothier's greeting, while he pauses ecstatically for an appropriate smile; blessed and safe as flirting by telephone with a centripetal divinity at the exchange, sweet-voiced, invisible and anonymous; blessed but unsatisfying as a tariff reform bill stuffed with local concessions.
From roseate fantasy to grim realism is a tumble sharp and sudden to the dreamer in the Shelter Tent.
His ormolu and bijoutry consist of a deformed pocket mirror and a foreshortened pipe black as bombazine grief. His floor is honest old earth, rugless, plankless, naked as a marble Venus and cold as New England culture.
His decorated couch of down and carved mahogany, ebony inlaid, is superseded by a blanket and six fence-rails—rails quilled with keen splinters like the frightful porcupine; blanket harboring fecund colonies of that fraternal insect whose tentacles are inextricably entangled with every shuddering recollection of army vicissitudes; inescapable, inexpungable, yet nameless here forever more.
... Blessed is the voluptuousness of reverie, blessed and cheap as an expectant clothier's greeting, while he pauses ecstatically for an appropriate smile (Page [162])
His dresser of polished green malachite, silver-trimmed, shrinks to a surreptitious cracker-box hiding certain confiscated edibles for which some adjacent smoke-house holds a yawning vacancy, while Rachel weeps for her turkeys and refuses to be comforted because they were shot.
In the said cracker-box, like a jewel in a toad's tooth, we may also find all that can legitimately represent in fact the figments of our hero's appetizing hallucinations, the customary ration of his daily gulp and growl. Here is hard, hard bread, stamped B. C., so dry that age can not wither it nor bicuspid masticate; acrid and bellicose pork, premonitory of thirst and tapeworm, rich in albuminates, but utterly poverty-stricken as to savor, odor and social status. Here is raw beef from the east rump of a most attenuated anatomy, doubtful as the welcome of an uninvited visitor; sufficient unto the soup is the toughness thereof, no less.
The uses of venerable and ubiquitous hard-tack were as numerous as they were suggestive. Its presence in all emergencies was one of the mysteries of the eternal law of supply and demand, one of the grand consummations and compensations of the art of war. In its natural state it was dry, flinty, tasteless and juiceless, but stored as full of nutriment as a serenade of musty eggs and flagrant onions is stuffed with archaic perfumes. Smashed into chiplets with a hammer, moistened to pulpiness in cold water, fried in pork fat and served hot, it was dubbed "slumgullion." Pounded to gritty dust, reduced to thick dough with warm water, seasoned with salt and pepper and baked in thick cakes, it became fit ambrosia for the sages of the ages and was known as "Son-of-a-gun." Burned to a crisp, boiled in water, and eaten with a spoon it was as thoroughly disguised as odorless whisky or smokeless tobacco, in the soubriquet "gum chowder."