readers can notice greater substance in what may otherwise have seem to be a transparent set piece. For example, in "A Boston Ballad" (Poetry and Prose 404-6), Whitman resurrects "the dead out of the earth!" These particular ghosts are maimed militiamen from the colonial era. They appear as "phantoms" amidst federal forces marching in what is, for Whitman, present-day Boston (1854): A fog follows, antiques of the same come limping, Some appear wooden-legged, and some appear bandaged and bloodless, Why this is indeed a show--it has called the dead out of the earth! The old graveyards of the hills have hurried to see!i Phantoms!i phantoms countless by flank and rear! Cock'd hats of mothy mould-crutches made of mist! Arms in slings--old men leaning on young men's shoulders. (8-14) The occasion of the poem is some kind of "show" (more on that later) taking place in Boston in 1854. The show involves a public procession of "the President' s marshal" (4) and those in "the Federal foot and dragoons" (5). Whitman notices how clean they all look: "How bright shine the cutlasses of the foremost troops! / Every man holds his revolver, marching stiff through Boston town" (7-8). If those in the procession are clean, those watching the procession are just as clean: "well dress'd" onlookers who "orderly [...] conduct themselves" (22). In contrast to the clean and "cute" (42) appearance of everyone at the 1854 procession, Whitman imagines a parallel event in which "antiques of the same" present- day soldiers "come limping" alongside them. Usually, we expect that it is the ghosts who disturb the living. But remarkably, in "A Boston Ballad" it is the ghosts who are