p and roughing had not effaced
it from my disposition--one more lesson was wanting, and I got it.

"Among my visitors was an old captain of the rough school of military
habit, with all the dry jokes of the recruiting service, and all the
coarseness which a life spent, most part in remote stations, and small
detachments, is sure to impart. This old fellow, Mat Hubbart, a well
known name in the Glengarries, had the greatest partiality for practical
jokes--and could calculate to a nicety, the precise amount of a liberty
which any man's rank in the service permitted, without the risk of
being called to account: and the same scale of equivalents, by which he
established the nomenclature for female rank in the army, was regarded
by him as the test for those licences he permitted himself to take
with any man beneath him: and as he spoke of the colonel's 'lady,' the
major's 'wife,' the captain's 'woman,' the lieutenant's 'thing'--so
did he graduate his conduct to the husbands--never transgressing for a
moment on the grade, by any undue familiarity, or any unwonted freedom.
With me, of course, his powers were discretionary--or rather, had no
discretion whatever. I was a kind of military outlaw, that any man might
shoot at--and certainly, he spared not his powder in my behalf.

"Among the few reliques of my Indian life, was a bear-skin cap and hood,
which I prised highly. It was a present from my old guide--his parting
gift--when I put into his hands the last few pieces of silver I
possessed in the world. This was then to me a thing, which, as I had met
with not many kindnesses in the world, I valued at something far beyond
its mere price; and would rather have parted with any, or everything
I possessed, than lose it. Well, one day on my return from a fishing
excursion, as I was passing the door of the mess-room, what should I see
but a poor idiot that frequented the barrack, dressed in my bear-skin.

"'Holloa! Rokey,' said I, 'where did you get that?' scarce able to
restrain my temper.

"'The captain gave it me,' said the fellow, touching his cap, with a
grateful look towards the mess-room window, where I saw Captain Hubbart
standing, convulsed with laughter.

"'Impossible!' said I--yet half-fearing the truth of his assertion. 'The
Captain couldn't give away what's mine, and not his.'

"'Yes, but he did though,' said the fool, 'and told me, too, he'd make
me the "talk man" with the Indians, if you didn't behave better in
f