the hardships
of military life, but when a soldier is kind-hearted, he is often a much
more helpful and thoughtful and handy husband than any equally
well-meaning civilian. Amid the ups and downs of their wanderings, the
discomforts of shipboard and of stations in the colonies, bad servants,
and unwonted sicknesses, the Captain's tenderness never failed. If the
life was rough, the Captain was ready. He had been, by turns, in one
strait or another, sick-nurse, doctor, carpenter, nursemaid, and cook to
his family, and had, moreover, an idea that nobody filled these offices
quite so well as himself. Withal, his very profession kept him neat,
well-dressed, and active. In the roughest of their ever-changing
quarters he was a smarter man, more like the lover of his wife's young
days, than Mr. Bull amid his stationary comforts.

Then if the Captain's wife was--as her friends said--"never settled,"
she was also forever entertained by new scenes; and domestic mischances
do not weigh very heavily on people whose possessions are few and their
intellectual interests many.

It is true that there were ladies in the Captain's regiment who passed
by sea and land from one quarter of the globe to another, amid strange
climates and customs, strange trees and flowers, beasts and birds, from
the glittering snow of North America to the orchids of the Cape, from
beautiful Pera to the lily-covered hills of Japan, and who in no place
rose above the fret of domestic worries, and had little to tell on their
return but of the universal misconduct of servants, from Irish "helps"
in the colonies to _compradors_ and China-boys at Shanghai. But it was
not so with the Captain's wife. Moreover, one becomes accustomed to
one's fate, and she moved her whole establishment from the Curragh to
Corfu with less anxiety than that felt by Mrs. Bull over a port-wine
stain on the best table-cloth.

And yet, as years went and children came, the Captain and his wife grew
tired of travelling. New scenes were small comfort when they heard of
the death of old friends. One foot of murky English sky was dearer,
after all, than miles of the unclouded heavens of the South. The gray
hills and overgrown lanes of her old home haunted the Captain's wife by
night and day, and homesickness, that weariest of all sicknesses, began
to take the light out of her eyes before their time. It preyed upon the
Captain, too. Now and then he would say, fretfully, "I should like an
English