And when earth has been clothed with magnificence for his royal appearing, the sun himself wheels up from the nether deep, thus heralded and attended with all due pomp of an unchallenged majesty. His affluent beams pour in molten cascades down the revealed gorges; they gild and glorify clustered pinnacles; they awake into sparkling greenness the pine-clad slopes, and flame into burning scarlet on banks of hidden bloom. Then rising higher with the mists of morning still enrobing him, while hymning echoes of aroused animation fill the air, he proudly, grandly marches up the sky--more grandly than any monarch who ever trod the world's stately palaces and commanded the homage of a prostrate throng. Even thus we fondly believe our dawning will brighten into perfect day. Even thus the sun of our consummated civilization will rise and shine. The hues that beautify and not the heat that withers will be in his glow. And on dissolving storm clouds of a bitter bloody past, he will paint the rainbow of an abiding pledge, that government of the people, for the people, by the people shall not perish from the earth. The war for the Union, with all its majestic pageantry, is a thing of the distant past. But its events have plucked the shining years they gilded, even from this wondrous century, and molded them into a beacon for ages yet to come. Let veterans rejoice in their honorable relation to those events, and cherish with pride their sacred recollections. Among these recollections is that of the contracted habitation, grander in its humility than a palace imperial, which domiciled a patriotism that was stainless and a heroism that was sublime, the useful, modest, unappreciated Shelter Tent. It went with the heroes of the war for the Union, through all their vivid experiences, as they marched and camped and fought and conquered. They were the heroes of the war, the heroes of the age. They marched through deep wildernesses and across rough mountain ranges; through stony paths that grilled their ankle bones, and freezing creeks that chilled their shoulder blades with a glacial emulsion; through fruiting farmsteads with broad avenues of maple, beech and oak; through beckoning orchards reddened for the clutch of hungry hands. They marched through burning sands or stifling limedust white as shredded alkali; through shoreless mud, black, yellow, red or gray, tough, tender, slushy or plastic, but always tenacious as Arabic gums.