of it; if ordered away in twenty-four hours, you forget
all wasted labor in the excitement of departure. Thus viewed, a camp is
a sort of model farm or bit of landscape gardening; there is always some
small improvement to be made, a trench, a well, more shade against the
sun, an increased vigilance in sweeping. Then it is pleasant to take
care of the men, to see them happy, to hear them purr.

Then the duties of inspection and drill, suspended during active
service, resume their importance with a month or two of quiet. It really
costs unceasing labor to keep a regiment in perfect condition and ready
for service. The work is made up of minute and endless details, like a
bird's pruning her feathers or a cat's licking her kittens into their
proper toilet. Here are eight hundred men, every one of whom, every
Sunday morning at farthest, must be perfectly _soigne_ in all personal
proprieties; he must exhibit himself provided with every article
of clothing, buttons, shoe-strings, hooks and eyes, company letter,
regimental number, rifle, bayonet, bayonet-scabbard, cap-pouch,
cartridge-box, cartridge-box belt, cartridge-box belt-plate, gun-sling,
canteen, haversack, knapsack, packed according to rule, forty
cartridges, forty percussion caps; and every one of these articles
polished to the highest brightness or blackness as the case may be,
and moreover hung or slung or tied or carried in precisely the correct
manner.

What a vast and formidable housekeeping is here, my patriotic sisters!
Consider, too, that every corner of the camp is to be kept absolutely
clean and ready for exhibition at the shortest notice; hospital,
stables, guard-house, cook-houses, company tents, must all be brought to
perfection, and every square inch of this "farm of four acres" must
look as smooth as an English lawn, twice a day. All this, beside the
discipline and the drill and the regimental and company books, which
must keep rigid account of all these details; consider all this, and
then wonder no more that officers and men rejoice in being ordered on
active service, where a few strokes of the pen will dispose of all this
multiplicity of trappings as "expended in action" or "lost in service."

For one, the longer I remained in service, the better I appreciated the
good sense of most of the regular army niceties. True, these things must
all vanish when the time of action comes, but it is these things that
have prepared you for action. Of course, if