Meantime Dress Parade goes on. The evolutions and involutions continue to revolve, until the tired recruits are threatened with serious affection in the yellow pine district of the lumber region. The manual of arms goes through all its ascensions and declensions, its conjugations and calamities. He who would follow all its ramifications must have a head on him like the learned pig. Arms are presented, shouldered, ordered, right-shifted, trailed and held aport. Bayonets are charged and fixed and clattered until their gleam threatens to scream. No such confusion has prevailed since Lot's wife was transformed into chloride of sodium. One third of the commands are unintelligible; another third are incapable of execution according to tactics; no two companies have been drilled alike; no three consecutive soldiers perform the same antic at the same time. No movement is attempted that does not yield mixtures of grief, drollery and exasperation, sufficing for the most miscellaneous requirement. Meritorious attributes sometimes crop out in unexpected places--many a man conceals a bruised and bleeding heart beneath a porous plaster. Humor and drollery develop. Still the routine goes on, nominally monotonous, but in reality miraculously diversified. [Illustration: ... _No two companies have been drilled alike; no three consecutive soldiers perform the same antic at the same time_] Arms are trailed, right-shouldered, presented, ordered; bayonets are fixed, unfixed, or transfixed; rammers are sprung and imaginary cartridges are subjected to supposititious mastication. Over and over again, in bewildering diversity of succession, are the orders inaccurately given and confusedly executed, until the colonel's martial rage is seemingly appeased. Man wants but little here below, while woman wants many things and wants them all marked down. Both man and woman ought to find in this notable performance a maximum of _quantum suf_. The perfunctory reading of orders; the reports of first sergeants; the grand spectacular advance of the officers, might each inspire a modern society poem, printed on linen paper with ink worth a dollar a pound. The final dismissal of parade; the departure of companies to their respective quarters--these are mere routine. They are essential, perhaps, but dull, tasteless, flameless as unleavened sanctimony. It is vanity and vexation to be born with a silver spoon in one's mouth, if there is nothing in the spoon.