With the army shoe, the army bean, the army mule, and the unfailing army nerve, they marched on to new and noble conquests. They organized commonwealths; founded cities; edited newspapers; captured judgeships, governorships, senatorships, the presidency, administering the multiform functions to their own eternal honor and with benefit to all. Officeholding had charms for them recondite as the link between beans and blue-stockings, inscrutible as the dynamics of a cucumber which has concealed its aggressiveness until 3 a. m. Should the demon of filibuster raise his crest from opposition benches in any one of a score of legislative assemblies, you might readily count a full quorum of them, each busily tying knots with his tongue which no agility of his teeth could undo, each kindly instructing novices how to work a tennis racket or advising experts how to extract honey from Celtic ground-apples. Their arguments might be loose in the joints like a plaisance camel, but they unerringly arrived at an available conclusion. The feeble but sage members of a swell chappie clique might pronounce them insufferable as to style, but they went on capturing and conquering things by instinctive predilection and force of habit. They experienced little exhilaration from the effervescence of hired rapture and purchased adulation; their financial views habitually had the ring of two metals; their accomplishments might stop short of the mandolin and their scholarship shy at an ablative absolute. But they reached the goal, on the average, and "Get there Eli!" was their practical rendition of the motto "Excelsior." Of seven presidents elected since the close of the war, six were ex-soldiers. Minnesota points with pride to her nine soldier governors. The Veterans quietly gathered in the voluntary and involuntary honors of their admiring countrymen, while the chief function of their traducers seems to have been to crop thistles, grow ears and bray. The surviving Veterans of the Union army were neither drones in the busy hive of national development, nor a burden on the benevolence of their fellow-citizens. Ninety-five per cent. of them made a success in the civil battles of life--doing men's part honorably, industriously, heroically in the work of the world. Only five per cent. were failures, less than three per cent. ever became wholly dependent on public charity for support. [Illustration: _The veterans quietly gathered in the voluntary and involuntary honors.... One state points with pride to her nine soldier governors, and of seven presidents elected since the close of the war, six were ex-soldiers_]