Stock exchange piousness, on affectionate terms with itself, and clear, calm, introspective natures, stuffed with binomial theorems, may sneer at compassion and gratitude; are not small potatoes the raw material of a dignity that is born of starch? The county seat molder of public opinion who can manage to keep three jumps ahead of the sheriff, and pay for his boiler plate editorial C. O. D., vies with the New York newspaper syndicate backed by indefinite millions 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 join the ecclesiastical mignonette and journalistic geranium in proclaiming threatened peril to the republic from the fulfillment of a moiety of her despairing pledge to provide for the disabled. The oblique expostulations of professed friends are less endurable than the open malice of enemies. The one-story man with a gravel roof has no conception of sky-parlors. Let the untranslatable functionary rise up and bray responding echoes in fit, sufficient answer. They jest at scars who never sniffed saltpetre. They mock at wounds who never confronted a foe more tangible than a Baconian cryptogam. But the Old Soldier has learned to contemplate with philosophic tolerance the weak and wicked sides of human nature--the Christian science side, the Tammany tiger side, for example. Bluffs were unknown in his heartsome, wholesome youth; nor were jockeys subsidized to give 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 safely ignores an effervescence of mouth-vapor. Let those who surrendered to the idols of the uncircumcised and now seek to expunge their records, find merciful oblivion if they can. He tenders no apologies for his motives and invokes no forgetfulness of his deeds. Like the backwoods preacher entangled in an unmanageable sentence, he may have lost his nominative case, but he is bound for the kingdom of heaven.