new far more of the
Rockies and Sierras than he did of the Alps, studied the European
cavalry with the eye of an accomplished critic, and stoutly maintained
that while they were bigger swells and prettier to look at, they could
neither ride nor shoot to compare with the sturdy troopers of his
father's squadron.

"As to uniforms," said Sandy, "anybody could look swagger in the lancer
and huzzar rig. It takes a man to look like a soldier in what our
fellows have to wear."

It wasn't the field garb Sandy despised, but the full dress, the blue
and yellow enormity in which our troopers are compelled to appear.

It had been the faint hope of his fond parents that Master Sandy would
grow up to be something, by which was meant a lawyer, an artist,
architect, engineer,--something in civil life that promised home and
fortune. But the lad from babyhood would think of nothing but the army
and with much misgiving, in Sandy's fifteenth year, his father shipped
him to Kentucky, where they were less at home than in Kansas, and gave
him a year's hard schooling in hopes of bracing up his mathematics.

Sandy was wild to go to West Point, and at the bottom of his heart Major
Ray would have rejoiced had he thought it possible for Sandy to pull
through; but ruefully he minded him how hard a task was his own, and how
close he came to failure at the semi-annual exams. "Sandy hates Math.
even more than I did," said he to Marion, his devoted wife. "It was all
I could do to squirm through when the course was nowhere near as hard as
it is to-day, so don't set your heart on it, little woman."

The appointment was not so hard to get, for Major Billy had a host of
friends in his native State, and an old chum at the Point assured him he
could coach young Sandy through the preliminary, and indeed he did.
Sandy scraped in after six months' vigorous work, managed to hold his
own through the first year's tussle with algebra and geometry, which he
had studied hard and faithfully before, was a pet in his class, and the
pride and joy of his mother's and sister's heart in yearling camp, where
he blossomed out in corporal's chevrons and made as natty and active a
first sergeant as could be found while the "furlough class" was away.

But the misery began with "analytical" and the crisis came with
calculus, and to the boy's bitter sorrow, after having been turned back
one year on the former and failing utterly on the latter, the verdict of
the Academic Boa