The Army Mule and Other War Sketches

phal, fought battles single-handed in periods of antiquity now remote and malodorous. The last samples perished some centuries ago,

large invoice of miscellaneous crockery. No such burden ever before fell on the youth of any era; no such imperial manhood was ever before developed in a single generation. Greece molded countless heroes of her own, and has thrust her hand into every mass of mort

ling than that of the local press and pulpit arising as the voice of one man to celebrate the production of some abnormal cucumber; he went to town to see the parade, and, vowing he would ne'er enlist, enlisted. He was a store clerk, skilled in pounds, pints and prints, with a thin top dressing of Latin, and a silvery Minnehaha gush of gaiety in every mo

d natures accepted no yoke of discipline. These fast young men traveled rapidly, because their road was all down grade. They were the same then as now, the same yesterday, to-day and next century-worthless and fruitless, first, last and forever. Each successive five years brings a new generation of them, as the novices of five years previous, worn out and burned out by dissipation, disappear over the divi

, and a prophecy of Appomattox was written on his brow. Into the white chambers of his soul only such things cou

fields from Wilson's Creek to Bentonville, at a salary of thirteen munificent dollars a month in depreciated greenbacks, put the love of life's joys beh

id not loom to an adequate altitude or permeate to a sufficient degree of prevalence. Else had no Southron dared promise himself to whip the people who had invented and built up and managed the great material enterprises of the nation-or desired to whip them. Ignorance fluttered around recklessly until he singed his ostentatious whiskers in the flames of the pit; yea, more,-until he was blistered to the eyebrows with scorchings of the everlasting bonfire. Where ignorance is bliss, politics degenerates into irredeemable idiocy and ineffable slush; the campaign of mutual delusion goes on and

in the south forty years ago, the slaveholders' rebellion would have been impossible, just as in the prosperous, progressive American republic of to-day with ten million depositors in her banks and twenty million children in her schools, a successful assault on intelligence and prosperity wo

onceded the fitness of a sobriquet which exalted their uniform to the dignity of a moral attribute, and tinged their classification with the hue of their trousers. It was Plato who said: "The brave shall

f the Union. Lint-scraping and bandage winding were minor episodes. Their work was many sided as a prism, with every angle reflecting a radiant intensity. And all the

th war and peace were chrysanthemum visions, soft, rosy and spicy. The compliments were well earned and welcome; welcome and wholesome as a thoughtful surgeon's timely prescription in the cold drizzle of a night march, when he proffered his flask with: "Gentlemen, you need a

. All recognized that wherever a surviving soldier stood, there was a sentinel of liberty. The Veterans came to the front in every sphere of activity, with the nerve that stakes a royal flush against a marble synagogue. They performed their full share of every-day work, and they rose to high positions in

arrayed like one of them. Many of them went south, where they were greeted with black looks from white men and white smiles from black men; a few remained there and outgrew both. Gleefully as the beefsteak sings on the gridiron, the ring of their axes sounded through northern forests; their hearts and heads were solid to the innermost core, like the stumps they left behind them. Broad prairies in the west blossomed wit

e demon of filibuster raise his crest from opposition benches in any one of a score of legislative assemblies, you might readily count a full quorum of them, each busily tying knots with his tongue which no agility of his teeth could undo, each kindly instructing novices how to work a tennis racket or advising experts how to extract honey from Celtic ground-apples. Their arguments might be loose in the joints like a plaisance camel, but they unerringly arrived at an available conclusion. The feeble but sage members of a swell chappie

nine soldier governors. The Veterans quietly gathered in the voluntary and involuntary honors of their admiring

ellow-citizens. Ninety-five per cent. of them made a success in the civil battles of life-doing men's part honorably, industriously, heroically i

One state points with pride to her nine soldier governors, and of seven pr

he honey-dew days of the "Boys in Blue" had gaily floated in geysers of taffy, constantly sprayed with cascades of gush, were, ten years later, the objects of fathomless solicitude on the part of contemporaries who feared that universal pauperism would engulf them. Vain was the dread; bootless the solicitude. In the aggregate, the discharged Veterans contributed in taxes more than the sum total of their army pay, and by their own productive labor added more to the wealth of the nation than the entire cost of the war. And at any time within the last thirty years t

stant Honolulu. Ireland and Poland, lanced spots of a huge European suppuration, have felt the pulsations of our victory. And on the dim frontiers of far-off Argentina, sweet girl graduates of Minnesota's normal schools, daughters of Veterans, turbaned with haloes and aproned wit

t they might almost be punched with holes and performed on self-playing pianos, automatically, as it were. But the terms are obsolete, and the current period has brought its special designation, tremulous as a phrase from De Senectute, and redol

m's horn that triturated the defenses of Jericho. It tells a truth, though more cruel than that sweeping massacre when the patriarch Cain came with

lacteal artist lactealizes the sober, circumspect cow, the product is harmless as the process and participants; no spirituous or vinous venom from that nourishing fountain e'er exudes. When the lion eats a lamb the lamb becomes lion;

ome of his elasticity is as deceptive as the hospitality of an alleged park dotted all over with warnings to keep off the grass. He may profitably display that charity which covers a multitude of sarcasms, and serenely accept the inevitable as a companion piece to tariff reduction, civil-

lingering aborigines who are chewing salt pork, sandwiched with bread of idleness, out in the bad lands; but they will not linger long. The ribald glee of the society sharp, boasting an ?sthetic eclat acquired at Christmas free lunches and other luxurious functions, probes to no sore spots. Honesty is probably the best policy when the amount involved is s

udiced tribunal would summarily rule out all evidence for the defense and refuse to note an exception. Only two generations lie between the shirt-sleeves of the money-making ancestor and the patched pants of his impoverished great-gra

an antidote to his precedent fairest visions of the heavenly. There are said to be tenors before whose singing the l

s in Blue or the gallant Veterans. The free coinage of silver has gone on among their plenteous locks, whether auburn, black or brown, unmindful

ult, even though it create an ice gorge in Ohio politics. He braves the feeble wrath of the political dilettante, with a daily surplus of brains (fried in crumbs), principally solicitous to provide mermaids with divided skirts and get dried insects on the free list. He fully indorses Horace Greeley's theory that s

with white neckgear and other signs of piety, men with binocles and other signs of culture, men with unclassifiable crania and faces unfit for publication, have snubbed and jeered the Old Soldier, but he still survives. An unsullied Amer

illions of Chicago beef money, in delicate sarcasm. Go to the mule, thou dizzard, and learn of him! From that speechless, untranslatable functionary valuable information may be extracted wholly novel to thy groveling consciousness; amongst much else surely this, that gratefulness is mate to saintliness. Even in the late James brothers' section of darkest America, this is accepted orthodoxism. The statesman with pickerel brow and muscalonge integument may jo

e their backers tips. Undreamed-of was the soft, seductive game of flim-flam. No one then suggested a law for the protection of innocent, elderly congressmen from the wiles of the seminary miss. The Veteran can pity those who hate him, and defy the gurgling giggle of his scorners-in the words of Sam Johnson, "he remembers who kicked him last." He who smote with the sword of the Lord and of Abraham safel

eckoning Richmond, only ten miles distant, have been welcomed, as with "sweet, reluctant, amorous delay" they returned to enjoy the privileges and even to accept the honors of the rich citizenship he fought to restore to them. He sees them squeezing pure olive oil and genuine creamery butter out of honest old cottonseed. He puts his own traditional pri

and radiant village greens, where self-delusion finds a fertile soil fenced with applauding auditors. It was his fortune to have contributed to the preservation of the Union,

-stamp had come; because the free school, the newspaper and the open Bible had come; because Wilberforce, and Garrison, and Harriet Stowe had come; because Lincoln, and Seward, and Stanton had come; because Grant, and Sherman, and Sheridan had come; because two million gallant boys in blue had come; because the great and terrible day of the Lord had come, and not all the powers of evil could longer buttress and bulwark the crowning iniquity of the univ

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cy of educational methods how we may. Escaping from cruel prison pens, where there was no one to love nor to caress, and with no light to direct but that sun of the sleepless, melancholy star, his ha

, on a raft of smoke-storm, with sparks wildly flying; each a flask for brittleness, whether decipherable into a nursing bottle or a sulphuric carboy. He learned to value his country as more precious for his personal sacrifice, stimulating his just demand that America shall henceforth be reserved for such as are or wish to be

nchesters and a shot-gun-the escape is just as grateful. For the campaign torch may then be extinguished; the paroxysm of hysterics illuminated by an aurora borealis vex and vaunt no more. The shout of the torch-bearer, screaming himself into grippe and pneumonia, is quenched. The heeler and the howler are alike silent-they have folded their tepees like Arabs and fled in wild dismay. The candidate n

ng market; the triumphant boss can accept from his Chicago admirers the finest banquet their slaughterhouses yield; the average honest partisan can rejoice in the temporary submergence of t

terals foaming from his lips, and Herr Altgeld brandishing his gold-clause lease before our blinking eyes, enter into the very sinew and substance of our recurring nightmares. We scorn them, and our scorn bites-usually. But this time it falls harmless as one of Chauncey Depew's periodi

esidents are liable to be nominated by intuition and elected by instinct. Then, also, the men who helped to save it once if not oftener-before, and are still willing diffidently to confess the fact, rejoice with others at the latest victory. We have recently been told in a magazine article, written by the meditative son of a confederate sire, that the rebellion was put down chiefly by its own pestiferous, irredeemable paper currency. This startling political warning

effort, achievement and sacrifice, no man other than the favored and gifted two or three ultimate leaders did more than an infinitesimal share. The shares of glory are proportionally minute-even our U. S.

idicule who struts to the front, while his hatband plays a sweet symphonic tribute to his valor. No genuine Old Soldier attempts to Weylerize his record. An occasional harmless effervescence of exaggeration is c

heir sacrifice with martyrdom. Surviving, they proved their willingness to die,

's scorching feet; they died in dismal prison pens, unshorn, unsheltered, hungering, thirsting, desolate, despairing; they died, four hundr

tem thoroughly rejuvenated by an invasion of graceful young Sophomores from Vassar, each with a cogent thesis on the remedy for punctured tires. They have lived to see the sun of Appomattox flood the planet with its warming, brightening beams. They have lived to know that the war's immortal hero, touring around the earth, penetrated no regions so remote that his fame had not preceded him, and visited no populations too ignorant to comprehend the significance of his victories. They have lived to read that in mud-hovels in the deepest hea

E

ing in Edwin Forbes' Army Sketch Book, with the kind perm

mb Riley's S

, Edgar

ll

l M.

ORIES OF THE HUMORIST, ED

w with James Whitcomb Rile

d; he has given more care and attention to the bringing out of this last work of his dead friend than he usually does to the mechanical and business details of his own books, and he had read

those who do seldom find it more than once. The same keen sense of the ridiculous, the same shyness of humor in conversation, the same gentleness of spirit and the same

over to the desk of the literary editor and exhibiting the volume. "They breathe the spirit of Nye in

r-of-fact view others took of the general propositions of life, and sympathized with it, but he did so with a native tendency to surprise and astound that ordinary state of mind and vision. He could say a ridiculous thing or perpetuate a ridiculous act with a face like a Sphinx, knowing full wel

e under each arm, with the tassels to the front. He was an invalid in looks as well as in strength, and when he appeared upon the platform thus equipped the astounded natives watched him with silent, sympathetic curiosity as he strode up and down, apparently seizing the opportunity for a little much-needed exercise.

AT THE RAIL

e, or the station, restaurant or bill-board on the other, Mr. Nye would break forth and begin to read the bill-board aloud: 'Soda water, crackers-highest prices paid for hides and tallow-also ice cream, golden syrup and feathers.' The passengers across the aisle would perk their ears, then rise

book and read aloud, in a monotonous sing-song, a lot of purest nonsense drawn from his imagination. It was done so seriously that the boy's eyes would begin to hang out as the reading went on. Finally Nye would shut the book up with a snap, losing the pl

this was a beautiful fast color and would wear like iron. It should be put up handsomely. When Nye paid him for the suit and asked that it be shipped to a way station in Iowa the tailor was sure that he was right in the mental measurement he had taken of his customer. The suit arrived, neatly lined with farmer's satin and Nye put it on. Day by day its bright blue grew lighter and lighter, until, when we arrived in Chicago, six weeks later, it was a kind of a dingy dun color. Nye remarked as the train pu

with defensive indignation, 'what in th

I suppose it was my fault and I ought to have known better. But since you insist,

making another suit out of cloth that was

ING THE

voice and he strained every nerve to meet it. Any extraordinary commotion in the hall discomposed him and he would wait until it subsided. It was not a pleasant thing for him to hear a voice from the

. He had barely got started when the doors opened and a great fellow about six feet and two inches tall entered with two ladies and immediately fell into an altercation with an usher about his seats. Nye paused and the altercation could be heard all over the hou

he hall,' said he, 'I was about to congratulate the audience upon

interrupter with such force that it drove him from the hall. After this episod

pirit of the perverse. Unexpected, trying things were always happening that seemed especially in line to test his patience.

OSE

istered for that fatal number; whereupon I promptly informed Mr. Nye that I should hold him to his promise. I remember I had a handful of mail I was very anxious to see, but I would not open it until I had got another room. Nye declared he wanted to first size up the room he had been assigned to, and went on down the hall with th

ng to believe that a humorist could ever be ill or have any reasonable excuse for breaking an engagement. He nev

and struck for the South, where they had the coldest weather they had ever known prior to Mr. Nye's advent. And there, though he was nearly dead, his syndicate letters had to go on just the same; and in fancy I can see tha

journey it would have been a physical impossibility for him to have reached his father's house before the burial. It was a peculiarly hard

uredly informed his bride fully of his circumstances. She, a brave woman and worthy partner, probably foresaw the force of the man and his coming recognition in time; at any rate she had great faith in him, and very cheerfully accepted the situation. Their we

City and the trip from there to the coast was to be the long-deferred wedding journey. He had built great hopes upon this prospect, and in the pleasure of anticipation had devised a dozen little schemes for the surprise and entert

e, they had not been removed to the hospital, as the regulations required, but had been permitted to remain at home, with the house quarantined. During the next few hours prior to Mrs. Nye's arrival, and in all agony of suspense and apprehension, Mr. Nye busie

mother; and Nye, with his heart breaking, sat downstairs and wrote to the children he was not permitted to see in their rooms above, l

old comrade at his best in this last published utterance, and the book itself so befittingly presented-so handsome and so

l M.

riber'

stent spelling and