A genuine military success requires painstaking method, as these premonitions indicate. There are glimpses of toilet, glimmers of gun barrel, suggestions of ablution, flashes of bayonet. There are dashes of shoe-polishing and hair-brushery--mad wrestle with a Paderewski growth of foliage, here and there. A tent fly lifts and the process of creating a contemptuous curl of mustache greets the penetrating vision. Bright steel rammers gleam in the glare of the giddy avenue. Advance individuals, nervously premature in completed canonicals, appear; then squads, groups, platoons--entire companies. Other things may be late and worms may chew them, but the scythe and hour-glass are always on time. So is Dress Parade. Companies are aligned and files are counted off. Sergeants, surcharged with a rude, luminous unshaken faith in the republic, tumble stumblingly into their positions. Corporals, sensitive as the bulb of nerve fiber at the end of a cat's whisker, are given the merry hand with a marble heart. The captain, already disliked by the enemies he has made, flings himself to the perilous front. Ranks are right faced and levant longitudinally, at a modified gallopade, toward the aforementioned color line. Here, after miscellaneous entanglements, unequaled since cable and trolley emancipated the mule from tram car servitude, a measurable coherence is secured. The companies form by some sort of incomprehensible intuition of incidence, on four or five alleged "guides." These stand with inverted muskets and quaking knees, a soft spot in the head and a hot spot in the cheek, robust delineations of despairing imbecility. Their terrors are tremendous, reminding one of that sweetly solemn village hour, when curfew rings and small boys hunt their haunts. The colonel is now suddenly disclosed. He has dropped, unseen, presumably from the propitious heavens, into his allotted station, some forty paces in front of the center. At any rate, he is there. And if I had a hundred dollars--as I had once, though I may never look upon its like again--I would wager it all that he wishes he were somewhere (anywhere) else.