w, another addition to the melancholy of the
Yukon; its extensive buildings, barracks, and officers' quarters,
post-exchange and commissariat, hospital, sawmill, and artisans' shops,
a spacious, complete gymnasium only recently built, are all vacant and
deserted. In the yards lie three thousand cords of dry wood, a year's
supply; cut on the hills, awaiting the expected annual contracts, lie as
many more--six thousand cords of wood left to rot! Some of us perverse
"conservationists," upon whom the unanimous Alaskan press delights to
pour scorn, lament the trees more than the troops.

One may write thus and yet have many pleasant personal associations
with the post and those who have lived there. A large and varied
military acquaintanceship is acquired by regular visits to these Alaskan
forts, for the whole command changes every two years. If one stayed in
the country long enough one would get to know the whole United States
army, as regiment after regiment spent its brief term of "foreign
service" in the North. Gazing upon the empty quarters, the occasion of
my first visit came back vividly, when there was diphtheria amongst the
natives at Circle and none to cope with it save the missionary nurse.
The civil codes containing no provision for quarantine, the United
States commissioner at Circle could not help, and the Indians grew
restive and rebellious, and when Christmas came broke through the
restrictions completely. Even some of the whites of the place defied her
prohibition and attended native dances and encouraged the Indians in
their self-willed folly.

[Sidenote: SOME ARMY OFFICERS]

So I went up the week's journey to Eagle and sought assistance from
Major Plummer, the officer commanding the post, who, after telegraphing
to Washington, promptly despatched a hospital steward and a couple of
soldiers, and placed them entirely at the nurse's disposal. "I don't
think we have any law for it," he said, "but we'll bluff it out." And
bluff it out they did very effectively until the disease was stamped
out, and then they thoroughly disinfected and whitewashed every cabin
that had been occupied by the sick. I used to tell that nurse that, so
far as I knew, she was the only woman who had ever had command of United
States soldiers.

Then there was Captain Langdon of the same regiment, the scholarly
soldier, with the account of every great campaign in history at his
fingers' ends. I recollect one evening, when we had been t