He travels from Ohio to the gulf, but not in a palace car nor on a deadhead ticket. Far otherwise. He goes out for an extended starring tour in the provinces and assists in presenting a magnificent drama, but only evokes volleys of powerful and prolonged hisses from the guys of the gallery. He brings up the rear of the most gigantic and jubilant salvation army since salvation was revealed, but he is not conceited. He is full of suppressed merit as an egg is of omelet, yet bashful as the kerchiefless caller who toys with the doily in nervous embarrassment while the seconds swell into centuries. He officiates in the conveyance of breadstuffs, otherwise hard-tack, mouldy and fungous, left over from the Mexican war, and fit only for slumgullion; of meats with the odor of a sewer-gas eruption; of black molasses, a sulphuret of glucose, sour as the tartrate of acrimony.
Also desiccated sundries obsolete as a rutabaga turnip, class of '56, or a weather guess from an anti-bilious almanac for '49, or the lottery wheel of a fair fakir in the early thirties. Likewise commissary whisky, vintage of lye, lime and fusel; decanted of all disgusts; confected for the scum of slums. But none of these have terror or temptation for him; he knoweth his master's feed box. A brave, bright, meritorious Mule is he, with a spring in his heel and healing in his springs.
He blots himself out of the green landscape of his youth, the asphodel meadows of peace that lie athwart the rustic tavern with its soft soap, communistic towel and brown sugar. He marches on, marshaled in double column closed in mass, to slaughters that will all the multitudinous creeks incarnadine, and fears not. He steps forth with countenance severe as that of the sterilized milk speculator whose investment has soured, but heart warm as the modest, efficacious fritter, dear to the breakfast relish of Hoosier schoolboys when the frost is on the melon and the fodder's in the stalk. He starts out in the morning eager as if something of great value were hanging just in front of him, with a town supervisor reaching for it and a creditor's meeting in the annex; he trudges along all day with the testy and sub-acid humor of a Pullman conductor, softened by a thousand patriotic reflections; he comes in at night on right by file into line, crisp and beautiful as a sarsaparilla lithograph.