people, they are
here to-day and gone to-morrow, you "never know where you have them";
they are probably in debt, possibly married to several women in
several foreign countries, and, though they are very courteous in
society, who knows how they treat their wives when they drag them off
from their natural friends and protectors to distant lands where no
one can call them to account?

"Ah, poor thing!" said Mrs. John Bull, junior, as she took off her
husband's coat on his return from business, a week after the Captain's
wedding, "I wonder how she feels? There's no doubt the old man behaved
disgracefully; but it's a great risk marrying a soldier. It stands to
reason, military men aren't domestic; and I wish--Lucy Jane, fetch
your papa's slippers, quick!--she'd had the sense to settle down
comfortably amongst her friends with a man who would have taken care
of her."

"Officers are a wild set, I expect," said Mr. Bull, complacently, as
he stretched his limbs in his own particular arm-chair, into which no
member of his family ever intruded. "But the red-coats carry the day
with plenty of girls who ought to know better. You women are always
caught by a bit of finery. However, there's no use our bothering _our_
heads about it. As she has brewed she must bake."

The Captain's wife's baking was lighter and more palatable than her
friends believed. The Captain (who took off his own coat when he came
home, and never wore slippers but in his dressing-room) was domestic
enough. A selfish companion must, doubtless, be a great trial amid 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