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.