or growling about his food. Some
years ago there was an occasion when I took breakfast at a decent
little hotel at a country way-station on a railroad out in Kansas. It
was an early breakfast, for the accommodation of guests who would leave
on an early morning train, and there were only two at the table,--a
young traveling commercial man and myself. The drummer ordered (with
other things) a couple of fried eggs, and that fellow sent the poor
little dining room girl back with those eggs three times before he got
them fitted to the exact shade of taste to suit his exquisite palate.
And he did this, too, in a manner and words that were offensive and
almost brutal. It was none of my business, so I kept my mouth shut and
said nothing, but I would have given a reasonable sum to have been the
proprietor of that hotel about five minutes. That fool would then have
been ordered to get his grip and leave the house,--and he would have
left, too.

I do not know how it may have been with other regiments in the matter
now to be mentioned, but I presume it was substantially the same as in
ours. And the course pursued with us had a direct tendency to make one
indifferent as to the precise cut of his clothes. It is true that
attention was paid to shoes, to that extent, at least, that the
quartermaster tried to give each man a pair that approximated to the
number he wore. But coats, trousers, and the other clothes were piled
up in separate heaps, and each man was just thrown the first garment on
the top of the heap; he took it and walked away. If it was an
outrageous fit, he would swap with some one if possible, otherwise he
got along as best he could. Now, in civil life, I have frequently been
amused in noting some dudish young fellow in a little country store
trying to fit himself out with a light summer coat, or something
similar. He would put on the garment, stand in front of a big looking
glass, twist himself into all sorts of shapes so as to get a view from
every possible angle, then remove that one, and call for another.
Finally, after trying on about every coat in the house, he would leave
without making a purchase, having found nothing that suited the exact
contour of his delicately moulded form. A very brief experience in a
regiment that had a gruff old quartermaster would take that tuck out of
that Beau Brummell, in short order.

Sometimes I have been, at a late hour on a stormy night, at a
way-station on some "jerk-water" r