When ten years more had lent distinction and distance to receding perspectives, the title changed to "Our Gallant Veterans." The asperity of opposition had softened; the respect of friends had deepened. There was tenderness in the accent which pronounced the words and in the sentiment which inspired them. All recognized that wherever a surviving soldier stood, there was a sentinel of liberty. The Veterans came to the front in every sphere of activity, with the nerve that stakes a royal flush against a marble synagogue. They performed their full share of every-day work, and they rose to high positions in the state. They generously divided the honors, even turning out early in the morning to give the devil his dews. This was comparatively easy, as the exposure of the crime of 1873 had not then upset nearly everything, nor had the new woman come, constantly provoking controversies with the antagonistic sex. The Veterans moved on the savage borderland and conquered it. They transferred sandy deserts into radiant farmsteads, festooned with clematis and enameled with gladiolus. Hated by men with stinging consciences or none, they retaliated never--or hardly ever. Though poor they were not discouraged; sockless, they were not ashamed. When bedizzened with frontier fringes, even Doctor Mary Walker with all her trousers was not arrayed like one of them. Many of them went south, where they were greeted with black looks from white men and white smiles from black men; a few remained there and outgrew both. Gleefully as the beefsteak sings on the gridiron, the ring of their axes sounded through northern forests; their hearts and heads were solid to the innermost core, like the stumps they left behind them. Broad prairies in the west blossomed with their chinchilla moustaches and their alfalfa whiskers. They opened mines, subdued vast wildernesses, tunneled mountains for railways and syphoned them for irrigation. They equipoised some of that surplus gravity which has at times caused the country to tip up on its eastern edge. They did not wear toothpick shoes, lemon-colored or otherwise; these they left to the weak and vicious elements of an effete civilization.