In combination with green apple fricasse, chicken stews, fresh pig roasts, and other sequestered interludes of commissariat anomalistic, it grew toothsome, ingenious, diversified. It was withal as acceptable to the muscular appetites of voracious young warriors as was a drafted man's certificate of exemption based on intermittent cramps in the stomach and a devout devoted mother-in-law dependent on him for support.
Here are the small white beans, anhydrous, true angel food, beloved of cherubim, immortalized in song, theme of interminable romance, most potent, grave and carbo-hydrate provender, seductive as a jack-pot, and satisfying as a high-church wedding service to a middlings purifier heiress; here, also, the indispensable coffee, and sugar wherewith it shall be confected, twin relics of homeland, sole reminder of hearthstones ante bellum. Here is rice, nourishing to Buddha and Confucius, redolent of joss-house and bungalow, chief of staff of the life of languid anthropophagi.
Here are desiccated vegetables; culmination of humiliation to nostril and stomach; a cross between counter-irritant and disinfectant; plausible as an argument for free raw material. Likewise concentrated milk, Queen Anne style; acidulated in the thunder-storms of centuries; more mysterious than the doctrine of dynamics to a colored youth gorged with clandestine watermelon. Also "rations" of soap of a retiring early disposition; facing a condition, not a theory; compost of refuse alkaline and oleagenous, but with soaring spirit of the army mule stowed in a steamer's hold until he soaks the air with sounds of remonstrance, kicks the rivets from the boiler and goes aloft with the explosion.
Moreover, all the frugal condiments and seasonings which, like timely words in a hot dispute, act chemically and precipitate the sediment—all these made lawful by the Articles of War and acts thereto amendatory. All these this shaky, unassuming cracker-box, chief of the snuggery's appointments, foremost in furnishing the Shelter Tent, doth garner and conceal with more than sealing-wax fidelity. Upon it rest the empty haversack, the dry canteen, the waist belt, bayonet scabbard, gunsling, and like et cetera of unused accoutrement, terrible to the turbulent classes, sharing their owner's earned and relished respite.
These aforesaid articles, together with a valuable collection of narrow escapes, constituted his tabulated assets, including capital, surplus and undivided profits. By reason of wealth he would not have been like the camel debarred from threading the needle's eye. But he was happy, nevertheless; happy as the free laborers who proudly wear untaxed overalls woven in foreign parts, and socks from the isles of the sea.
The Shelter Tent was not immortal, at least in the concrete. Neither was its occupant, howsoever swollen in the pride of his heart and other viscera over the sacredness of his cause and the splendor of his triumph. If immortality is to be achieved for the tent, the pen of history or the still small penetrating voice of tradition must be detailed for that duty. The Bengal tiger must not mew like inferior families of the felidæ, but here were a theme worthy the stanchest bard that glooms beneath the shining stars.
The texture of the Shelter Tent, though rivaling a corrugated copper casket as moisture proof, was far from indestructible. Worn to windowed raggedness was its final aspect, slashed, punched, shot-holed, and abraded, but faithful and useful to the end. Scorched also it may be, begrimed and soiled, march-stained and battle-singed, linked to its primal whiteness only as the vestal virgin of the Cuthead Sioux tepee is to her star-eyed Athenian prototype.
No matter. The cause in which its beauty and strength were expended was richly worth this, and all the infinitely more precious cost. We rejoice to believe that the events we commemorate were the ushering in of a millennial epoch in human history. We stand, as it were, wrapped still in obscurities, when a moonless night studded with glints of silver wears toward its end and the horizon of the favored east flushes with first promise of approaching day. Vague outlines of distant summits marshal themselves against the brightening azure, and soon flashes of crimson and purple playfully chase each other up to the silent zenith. Shafts of unutterable splendor begin to shoot through all the pulsing atmosphere, thrilling awakened nature with reviving life, a harbinger of coming glory.
And when earth has been clothed with magnificence for his royal appearing, the sun himself wheels up from the nether deep, thus heralded and attended with all due pomp of an unchallenged majesty. His affluent beams pour in molten cascades down the revealed gorges; they gild and glorify clustered pinnacles; they awake into sparkling greenness the pine-clad slopes, and flame into burning scarlet on banks of hidden bloom. Then rising higher with the mists of morning still enrobing him, while hymning echoes of aroused animation fill the air, he proudly, grandly marches up the sky—more grandly than any monarch who ever trod the world's stately palaces and commanded the homage of a prostrate throng. Even thus we fondly believe our dawning will brighten into perfect day.
Even thus the sun of our consummated civilization will rise and shine. The hues that beautify and not the heat that withers will be in his glow. And on dissolving storm clouds of a bitter bloody past, he will paint the rainbow of an abiding pledge, that government of the people, for the people, by the people shall not perish from the earth.