...a thousand men; the extensive drill-ground; the appropriate buildings, from the protecting hospital to the instructive guard-house. I can recall them in all the poetry of a romance which the pen of Hawthorne , in the wildest hours of his most exuberant fancy, could never excite in the pages of his Blithedale story. I can see them, too, in a reality which has forever and forever exorcised the fitful play...