The Army Mule and Other War Sketches

metric. The military science is of pre-classical antiquity, its roots shattering the sarcophagi of Cadmus, and Darius, and

nd orderly arrangement of troops for show and inspection just as the evolution of a

at last been solved! It was the boy in blue, his mother, and the girl he left behind him. Only the first had or could have the right to vote; the others had the higher right to be excused from voting. But all we

ways thereafter recurred to with prickling sensations at the roots of the hair and a revolving propensity in the pit of the stomach

proaching cosmorama may, with

fact. In his liver, quinine is already wrestling with calomel for the supremacy, even as in his soul remembered moral precepts are already summoned to mount guard against the wiles of sin. He is sugared o'er with the pale cast of virtue-stern in his rectitude as the senator who has never betrayed a trust. H

uresque, variegated and altogether incomprehensible strut, is positively unique. His awkwardness spreads and sprouts and amplifies and ramifies. To witness his embarrassment is

ented. He is helpless as a lawyer hurling maxims of abstract justice ruthlessly in the face of evidence. He is a non-commis

the world, by thunder, is not so proud. The triumphant statesman who has evolved a barley schedule that will put the robber barons of western Iowa to open shame, is no more inflated. The congressman who has exposed a rival's political armor-plate, honeycombed with blowholes, is less exultant. State linked to state, in goodly fate, in mart and mi

l he has accumulated an amount of frenzy which only blood of a highly oxygenized quality and in most generous libations can ever expect to satisfy. The candidate with a separate and distinct set of v

s battles from afar and threatens direful death in each resounding sneeze. His brow is knit into knots of perplexity by chasing tactic combinations which canter at will through the vasty thought-clefts of his gray matter, foreboding a fatty degeneration thereof. His fervid sou

g-replevin, breachy-steer class, are limp supernumeraries in all this busy ebullition. Marvel not that they mutter unprintable ideas as they pass along. Each has now a clawing consciou

black tips, and tall white hat swathed in a broad black band. Suppressed and quenched they stand, half-daft, with a glimmering recognition of their own marvelous

stands wrapped in the rampant amplitude of his own perpendicularity. His dignity is frigid as the icicles on the fateful blizzard's beard in those frosty northwest winters when the coyote ceases yelping and the gopher is at rest. His serenity can calmly smile at Satan's wrath and force a frowning fraud. He speaks an imitation West Point idiom

siege of Troy was boy's play in comparison. The embryo soldiery regard him with pride; admiring citizens look on him with poorly concealed reverence. He has already trimmed his corns to

of teaching a war ship how to swim. These are the bristling units, which, when he swings his commands around and over them, will submit their centripetence to his awecompelling centrifugence. They are flexible as a rubber

s, agitating the atmosphere with resonant trombone and shrieking piccolo. That is largely a matter of natural selection,-that is to say, of accident. But it is always obtrusive as a mourning costume expressly designed to adv

as been scientifically approved as a beverage-provided just enough brandy is added to take the cruelty out of the water. Without the band, parade would be a piebald abstraction, unthi

her back hair comes down in the midst of an eloquent peroration, are inscrutable and unfathomable. The bill for an act entitled an act to amend an act is likely then to lose its place on the calendar. But as a rule, the processes and boundaries of thought are immutably conditional. Its formulas were petrif

it can neither leap nor soar. Beyond this boundary philosophy can not direct man's tottering steps; further his unblazed path will lead into the vagaries and discords and peopled torments of lunacy, unless he permits faith to begin where reason ends. When a venerable

us. It is not conversant with the highest or the richest intellectual pursuits. It may exist to perfection defic

statesman of well recognized shrewdness and well advertised piety, entrusted with cabinet portfolios on the theory that public office is a private usufruct, is likely to tread the higher realms of intelligence with more certain footsteps

erlative battle, are the three degrees of comparison in war's activities. They are respectively tableau, melodrama and tragedy of systematic wa

of weapons and general efficiency. Battle brings out all the qualities which drills, parades, reviews and inspections have developed or exhibited. During parades and reviews the off

first dainty freshness, before a state of lethargy has supervened and suppurated, threatens the maddening frenzy that drowns all sorrow in ginger ale. Its occurrence then

success is a military ditto, with extra emphasis on the antepenultimate. Let the heathen rage and the plutocrats

belligerence of Persimmons, hires a typewriter, and opens hostilities in due form. Indications of the advent of an event worthy the delicate touch of Bjornstene Bjeminison's poetic fancy, are discerned.

-case ciphers just ready to be edited into the hell-box. They are keenly self-conscious of total eclipse in this martial splendor's plethoric incandescence. The rippling tee-hee of

rude. According to the accepted congressional code, nothing succeeds like success, when one is successful in succeeding himsel

y-mad wrestle with a Paderewski growth of foliage, here and there. A tent fly lifts and the process of creating a contemptuous curl of mustache greets the penetrating vision. Bright steel rammers gleam in the glare of the giddy avenue. Ad

haken faith in the republic, tumble stumblingly into their positions. Corporals, sensitive as th

qualed since cable and trolley emancipated the mule from tram car servitude, a measurable coherence is secured. The companies form by some sort of incomprehensible intuition of incidence, on four or five alleged "guides." These stand with inverted musk

d station, some forty paces in front of the center. At any rate, he is there. And if I had a hundred dollars-as I had o

h legs trembling. His make-up rivals that of a special Chinese envoy with the yellowest of jackets and peacockiest of tails. He carries a frown over the bridge of his nose that portends deep concealment of valuable information as to his own consequence, unknown to the world at large. That frown, however, is only borrowed for the occasion; at heart he is humble as the Chicago aristocrat who has squandered the price o

morning. He foams and fumes; he shouts and signals; he gesticulates; he genuflects; he perambulates. He pleads for correct formation as pallid Maryland corn fields plead for rain and fertilizers. His voice is softened by the sweet, feathery fluff on his upper lip, but it reaches far. His perplexities equal those of the man who went down from Jerusalem to Jericho and fell among hotel runners. But as in

d spirit of the deceased alderman when he finds that the streets of heaven are already paved and there can be no rake-off. Sad is the fond wife, rummaging her husband's pockets, when she discovers through her tears tha

nics by the adjutant. More heaving of anchors and straining at cables and hoisting on beam ends along the phalanx line. For the jolly mariners of the prairie, fresh from the delights of home, with its pealing bells and magic spells and appetizing smells, are trying to

tain decisive events, decisive as the mystic, ma

shoulders his tinseled pinking iron, and

er weltering in his optic, and his features bathed in gloom

the right; charges madly on the perplexed, expectant colonel standing pr

round at imminent ri

ly: "Shltr-r-r Hr-r-rm

ough the Norwegian may prefer alcohol. This is a free country, where, in the bright lexicon of sage brush statesmanship, there is no such word as surrender. This is a free country, where once in four years the voters may, if they see fit, commit all their political Jonahs to a school of whales with broad throats and stout stomachs. This is a free country, all the way from sterile Vermont

monotony, like a symposium on the cause and cure of panics. The absolute negation of simultaneousness is an abiding charm. Variety is spice; better thirty days of Texas than a pal

der), the prancings and rotatings approach a terminal. We near a period such as that when the last cork has been popped at a wine supper and the bill must be settled. Grudge not the details that gild the gliding moments as they go. He

tone: "Sir! the parade is formed!" Then, circling softly to right and rear of the rising splendor, he subsides, succumbs, and is henceforth lack-lustrous in this spangled pageant

and saddles" is sounded at frequent intervals. But outward silence reigns, as when a young woman, purple with throbbing timidity and expectant bashfulness, stands before her lover, u

d after valorous struggles, swings clumsily to a perpendicular. Excalibur's fit prototype, as emblem of authority and fruitful of coming slaughters, is revealed. Hear, oh! post-office, and give ear, all ye blacksmith shops. Great Mars, his son, has sway. Mock him not! Madness that way lies, or

o get into a wrestling match with reckless word-trippers. He does all the talking himself. Spherical, sonorous vocables, the well-conned phrases of command, roll out upon the quivering air, and smite the multitudinous ear of this battalion with a startling sense of impotency. The multitudinous arm reaches out in nervous effort

ered from Boston. A school girl in the same city wrote in her composition: "The boy thinks himself smart because he can wade where it is deep, but God made the dry land for ev

s vermiform appendix. The evolutions and involutions of a maiden effort at Dress Parade are incomprehensible as the ravings of a salaried jaw-smith in a labor strike, who has burst into a profuse stat

sly spurned. On the western frontier a presentable university can be set up with one bottle of sulphuric acid, a four-foot telescope and two ball bats. In some portions of the

, and five drinks later is ready for business, scorns the effeminate chappie who had his dog's tongue split in order to crease his pants. But in Chicago, where even the Goddess of Liberty frequently requires a chaperone after dark, such things will happen in spite of the most stringent police regulations. Besides which they are mostly incompetent, irrelevant and immateria

design and multifarious in execution; likewise in the manual of arms. The flabergasted novices stand inextricable, like some brittle Rosamond tangled in silken skeins to the queen's taste. You may bray a crank in

rom under promptly. Delays are dangerous. Iscariot with his twelve pieces of discredited coin folded

chromographic mottoes are largely responsible for the overcrowded state of the paresis wards in our asylums. How much of the phenomenal hereditary predisposition to recklessness which characterized the next generation after the war was attributable to the enforced repression of risibles at Dress Parade may never be definitely ascertained

his best girls, each compounded in five equal parts of beauty and brightness, grace, gush and giggle, gaze in ravenous, enraptured solicitude on the dreadful perform

dered, right-shifted, trailed and held aport. Bayonets are charged and fixed and clattered until their gleam threatens to scream. No such confusion has prevailed since Lot's wife was transformed into chloride of sodium. One third of the commands are unintelligible; another third are incapable of execution according to tactics; no two companies have been drilled alike; no three consecutive soldiers perform the same a

ke; no three consecutive soldiers perform

ation. Over and over again, in bewildering diversity of succession, are the orders inaccurately given and confusedly executed, until the colonel's martial rage is seemingly appeased.

n paper with ink worth a dollar a pound. The final dismissal of parade; the departure of companies to their respective quarters-these are mere routine. They are essential,

ect. Within a twelvemonth after muster-in the alert, alive and agile volunteers will have become so facile in their exercise that every motion is pivotal and simultaneous-a thousand with a single joint who hea

conscientious twinges. When uncle Silas comes from South Squam, and, for the first time, confronts the dizzy delights of a gay metropolis, there is danger in the air. Look not upon Monte Carlo when it

cations would ensue. They would equal the ferment from an accidental mixture of gin, gingerbread and sauerkraut, prime standard products of the early Knickerb

ed," rang along the attenuated line of some lingering battalion, and it dissolved into history. Parades, marches and b

rs of the olden time. Unrolled around us lies a continent, clothed with verdure as with a garment, heavy with its stores of hoarded wealth, all reserved for us in virgin purity and freshness since e

creasing freedom, increased nobility. Here the swarming millions yet to be, molded by free institutions and universal education into a refined and homogeneous race, multiplying their material comforts by now undreamed-of physical appliances, adorning their homes until each family shall

IN BLUE G