All these things float and allure and dazzle and tempt in the soaring fancy of the dilettante militant, who is lifted from a deep dark Hamlet melancholy to semi-celestial altitudes. But a drum-tap or a horse-neigh brings him down with a dull thud to the cramped coarse environment where he is tethered like an uneasy Indian restricted to a mental reservation. Blessed is the voluptuousness of reverie; blessed and cheap as an expectant clothier's greeting, while he pauses ecstatically for an appropriate smile; blessed and safe as flirting by telephone with a centripetal divinity at the exchange, sweet-voiced, invisible and anonymous; blessed but unsatisfying as a tariff reform bill stuffed with local concessions. From roseate fantasy to grim realism is a tumble sharp and sudden to the dreamer in the Shelter Tent. His ormolu and bijoutry consist of a deformed pocket mirror and a foreshortened pipe black as bombazine grief. His floor is honest old earth, rugless, plankless, naked as a marble Venus and cold as New England culture. His decorated couch of down and carved mahogany, ebony inlaid, is superseded by a blanket and six fence-rails--rails quilled with keen splinters like the frightful porcupine; blanket harboring fecund colonies of that fraternal insect whose tentacles are inextricably entangled with every shuddering recollection of army vicissitudes; inescapable, inexpungable, yet nameless here forever more. [Illustration: ... _Blessed is the voluptuousness of reverie, blessed and cheap as an expectant clothier's greeting, while he pauses ecstatically for an appropriate smile_] His dresser of polished green malachite, silver-trimmed, shrinks to a surreptitious cracker-box hiding certain confiscated edibles for which some adjacent smoke-house holds a yawning vacancy, while Rachel weeps for her turkeys and refuses to be comforted because they were shot. In the said cracker-box, like a jewel in a toad's tooth, we may also find all that can legitimately represent in fact the figments of our hero's appetizing hallucinations, the customary ration of his daily gulp and growl. Here is hard, hard bread, stamped B. C., so dry that age can not wither it nor bicuspid masticate; acrid and bellicose pork, premonitory of thirst and tapeworm, rich in albuminates, but utterly poverty-stricken as to savor, odor and social status. Here is raw beef from the east rump of a most attenuated anatomy, doubtful as the welcome of an uninvited visitor; sufficient unto the soup is the toughness thereof, no less.