The uses of venerable and ubiquitous hard-tack were as numerous as they were suggestive. Its presence in all emergencies was one of the mysteries of the eternal law of supply and demand, one of the grand consummations and compensations of the art of war. In its natural state it was dry, flinty, tasteless and juiceless, but stored as full of nutriment as a serenade of musty eggs and flagrant onions is stuffed with archaic perfumes. Smashed into chiplets with a hammer, moistened to pulpiness in cold water, fried in pork fat and served hot, it was dubbed "slumgullion." Pounded to gritty dust, reduced to thick dough with warm water, seasoned with salt and pepper and baked in thick cakes, it became fit ambrosia for the sages of the ages and was known as "Son-of-a-gun." Burned to a crisp, boiled in water, and eaten with a spoon it was as thoroughly disguised as odorless whisky or smokeless tobacco, in the soubriquet "gum chowder." In combination with green apple fricasse, chicken stews, fresh pig roasts, and other sequestered interludes of commissariat anomalistic, it grew toothsome, ingenious, diversified. It was withal as acceptable to the muscular appetites of voracious young warriors as was a drafted man's certificate of exemption based on intermittent cramps in the stomach and a devout devoted mother-in-law dependent on him for support. 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.