Even where the Veterans never went, their influence penetrated and vivified and fructified. Their aromatic, anæsthetic codfish, their mackerel stuffed with savor and salinity, have carried freedom's tidings to Borneo's wilds. A Grand Army post annually observes memorial day in distant Honolulu. Ireland and Poland, lanced spots of a huge European suppuration, have felt the pulsations of our victory. And on the dim frontiers of far-off Argentina, sweet girl graduates of Minnesota's normal schools, daughters of Veterans, turbaned with haloes and aproned with the flag, are unfolding the mysteries of orthography, chirography, cube roots, and syllogisms, to rejoicing grandchildren of authentic Patagonian cannibals. Whether as a Daniel come to judgment or a Jonah come to grief, the "Gallant Veteran" adorned his era--an era that is past.
The third decade brought peculiar revelations and some characteristic iconoclasms, wrought by the most gothic of vandals known to human kind. The deeds of the Boy in Blue and the Gallant Veteran have been told and retold in verses so musical that they might almost be punched with holes and performed on self-playing pianos, automatically, as it were. But the terms are obsolete, and the current period has brought its special designation, tremulous as a phrase from De Senectute, and redolent of lean and slippered Pantaloon--"The Old Soldier." It came in the days when colored cartoons were growing on the country like a bad habit, and it came to stay. Whether applied in honor and tenderness, or in derision and mockery, who can tell?
This epithet tells a truth, though perhaps emanating from indecent exposure of intellect in a brain whose convolutions are more crooked than the ram's horn that triturated the defenses of Jericho. It tells a truth, though more cruel than that sweeping massacre when the patriarch Cain came within one of slaying all the youth in Asia, or than the edict which collared and cuffed a dilapidated Coxey in the shadow of the capitol's proud dome.
Whether we like it or not, it has elements of permanence,--that euphony which is the kernel of fact; that levity which is the soul of wit; that pointedness which is the test of endurance. It has manifestly come to abide. When the lady lacteal artist lactealizes the sober, circumspect cow, the product is harmless as the process and participants; no spirituous or vinous venom from that nourishing fountain e'er exudes. When the lion eats a lamb the lamb becomes lion; when the lamb eats a lion the results can be better imagined than depicted. When the commonweal tourist falls aweary, he wins consolation from a rehearsal of "Bunion's Pilgrim's Progress, or the Trials of a Trail," and rises refreshed.