A bloodless military pageant may be a splendid spectacle, and hearts may beat high and eyes grow bright when the steady foot-fall of our "household troops" is heard on Broadway, and they file by with rich music, flashing banners and the proud consciousness of a strength that would be terrible if asserted; but what are such feelings to those with which the truly patriotic look upon those who have lost all their glow and gilding in the "baptism of fire," and acquired that sacred squalor springing from active and dangerous service? The faded, coat and cap and the dingy accoutrements are badges of honor, worth a thousand of those new, bright, untried, and incapable of telling or suggesting any heroic story. And if the ranks of a regiment of such men are thin, there is a glorious shadow standing in every vacant place once filled by a gallant soldier; and a voice rings out which gives the same reply to the inquiry after the absent ones, that was so long given in the armies of Napoleon's time to the roll-call which pronounced the name of La Tour d'Auvergne, the "First Soldier of France"--"dead on the field of honor!" Think of it, lady of the agricultural and ornithological bonnet and the irreproachable silks, when the next time in a city railroad car two "soldiers" sit down beside you, and one is a spruce, natty-whiskered, good-looking member of a pet regiment of the N.G.S.N.Y. or the N.Y.S.M., going down to an evening drill and a supper of oysters after it, and the other a hard-featured and weather-beaten discharged soldier from our Southern battle-fields, lame or otherwise, in faded uniform and a shirt not too suggestive of plentiful washerwomen,--think of this, and if you smile bewitchingly upon the one, as is your nature, when he apologizes for accidentally creasing your dress,--do not father up your robes with too much contempt, from contact with the stained garments of the other, who has outraged your _amor propre_ by taking a place beside you; for though you may be merely shunning contact with a vulgar ruffian or a coward who has deserted his colors in the hour of need--you _may_ be insulting a _hero_.