of extreme salubrity, of
contiguity to a charming little tumbled country in which the troops
may indulge in ingenious imitations of difficult man[oe]uvres; to
which it behooves me to add the advantage of enchanting drives and
walks for the entertainment of the impressible visitor. In winter,
possibly, the great circle of the camp is rather a prey to the
elements, but nothing can be more agreeable than I found it toward
the end of May, with the light fresh breezes hanging about, and the
sun-rifts from a magnificently cloudy sky lighting up all around the
big yellow patches of gorse.

At Aldershot the military class lives in huts, a generic name given to
certain low wooden structures of small dimensions and a single story,
covering, however, a good many specific variations. The oblong shanty
in which thirty or forty common soldiers are stowed away is naturally
a very different affair from the neat little bungalow of an officer.
The buildings are distributed in chessboard fashion over a very large
area, and form two distinct camps. There is also a substantial little
town, chiefly composed of barracks and public-houses; in addition to
which, at crowded seasons, far and near over the plain there is the
glitter of white tents. "The neat little bungalow of an officer," as I
said just now: I learned, among other things, what a charming form of
habitation this may be. The ceilings are very low, the partitions are
thin, the rooms are all next door to each other; the place is a good
deal like an American "cottage" by the seaside. But even in these
narrow conditions that homogeneous English luxury which is the
admiration of the stranger blooms with its usual amplitude. The
specimen which suggests these observations was cushioned and curtained
like a pretty house in Mayfair, and yet its pretensions were tempered
by a kind of rustic humility. I entered it first in the dark, but the
next morning, when I stepped outside to have a look at it by daylight,
I burst into pardonable laughter. The walls were of plain planks
painted a dark red: the roof, on which I could almost rest my elbow,
was neatly endued with a coating of tar. But, after all, the thing was
very pretty. There was a matting of ivy all over the front of the hut,
thriving as I had never known ivy to thrive upon a wooden surface:
there was a tangle of creepers about all the windows. The place looked
like a "side-scene" in a comic opera. But there was a serious little
English