er first visit to the West, and she wants to see cowboys and all
sorts of things. I should have said "wanted to see," for I think that
already her interest in brass buttons is so great the cowboys will
never be thought of again. There were two at Rock Creek, but they were
uninteresting--did not wear "chaps," pistols, or even big spurs. At the
Bird-Tail not one sheep was to be seen--every one had been sheared, and
the big band driven back to its range. Miss Duncan is a pretty girl, and
unaffected, and will have a delightful visit at this Western army post,
where young girls from the East do not come every day. And then we have
several charming young bachelors!

FORT SHAW, MONTANA TERRITORY, December, 1887.

THE excitement is about over. Our guests have returned to their homes,
and now we are settling down to our everyday garrison life. The wedding
was very beautiful and as perfect in every detail as adoring father and
mother and loving friends could make it. It was so strictly a military
wedding, too--at a frontier post where everything is of necessity "army
blue"--the bride a child of the regiment, her father an officer in the
regiment many years, and the groom a recent graduate from West Point,
a lieutenant in the regiment. We see all sorts of so-called military
weddings in the East--some very magnificent church affairs, others at
private houses, and informal, but there are ever lacking the real
army surroundings that made so perfect the little wedding of Wednesday
evening.

The hall was beautifully draped with the greatest number of flags of all
sizes--each one a "regulation," however--and the altar and chancel rail
were thickly covered with ropes and sprays of fragrant Western cedars
and many flowers, and from either side of the reredos hung from their
staffs the beautifully embroidered silken colors of the regiment. At the
rear end of the hall stood two companies of enlisted men--one on each
side of the aisle--in shining full-dress uniforms, helmets in hand. The
bride's father is captain of one of those companies, and the groom a
lieutenant in the other. As one entered the hall, after passing numerous
orderlies, each one in full-dress uniform, of course, and walked up
between the two companies, every man standing like a statue, one became
impressed by the rare beauty and military completeness of the whole
scene.

The bride is petite and very young, and looked almost a child as she and
her father slowly passed us