cial military nature imposed on them.

War collects many characters of peculiar idiosyncrasies, and jumbles
them strangely together, so that curious associations are produced. In
any collection of men upon a staff or in a regiment, gathered from
different localities, will be found characters of the most opposite and
incongruous elements. There will be the youth who has never before
travelled beyond his own village, and is full of small anecdotes of the
persons who have figured in his little world; and the silent and
reserved man of middle age, who, if he can be induced to talk, can tell
of many a wild scene in all quarters of the world in which he has been a
participant, since he stealthily left his native home, a boy of sixteen.
There are men who have passed through all the hardships of life, who
have been soldiers in half a dozen European armies, or miners in
California and Australia, or sailors; and men who have always had wealth
at their disposal, and spent years in foreign travel, viewing the world
only under its sunniest aspects. There are many officers grown gray
while filling subordinate capacities at posts on the Western prairies
and mountains, who can relate many interesting anecdotes of their
companions--the men now prominent in military affairs; and there are
officers of high rank, recently emerged from civil life, who nourish
prodigiously in self-glorification upon their brief warlike experience.
There are brave men, and men whose courage is suspected; quiet men, and
men of opinionated perversity; quick-witted men, and men whose profound
stupidity makes them continual butts for all kinds of practical jokes;
refined, educated, poetical men, and men of boorish habits. In short,
any camp presents such specimens of humanity as would be furnished if
all the ingredients of character and experience that compose the world
had been collected in a huge pepper box and sprinkled miscellaneously
throughout the army.

In such associations there are of course many occasions for extracting
interesting and comical conversation and incident. Jokes of all kinds
are constantly on the wing, and no one can consider himself safe from
collision with them. Ridiculous nicknames become attached--no one knows
how--to the most dignified characters, and altogether usurp the places
of the genuine cognomens. No person possesses the art of concealment to
such a degree that all his foibles and weaknesses will escape
observation in the comp