The dawn of another cloudless day was breaking and the dim lights at the guard-house and the hospital burned red and bleary across the sandy level of the parade. The company cooks were already at their ranges, and a musician of the guard had been sent to rouse his fellows in the barracks, for the old-style reveille still held good at many a post in Arizona, before the drum and fife were almost entirely abandoned in favor of the harsher bugle, by the infantry of our scattered little army. Plume loved tradition. At West Point, where he had often visited in younger days, and at all the "old-time" garrisons, the bang of the morning gun and the simultaneous crash of the drums were the military means devised to stir the soldier from his sleep. Then, his brief ablutions were conducted to the accompaniment of the martial strains of the field musicians, alternating the sweet airs of Moore and Burns, the lyrics of Ireland and Auld Reekie, with quicksteps from popular Yankee melodies of the day, winding up with a grand flourish at the foot of the flagstaff, to whose summit the flag had started at the first alarum; then a rush into rattling "double quick" that summoned the laggards to scurry into the silently forming ranks, and finally, with one emphatic rataplan, the morning concert abruptly closed and the gruff voices of the first sergeants, in swift-running monotone, were heard calling the roll of their shadowy companies, and, thoroughly roused, the garrison "broke ranks" for the long routine of the day. We have changed all that, and not for the better. A solitary trumpeter steps forth from the guard-house or adjutant's office and, at the appointed time, drones a long, dispiriting strain known to the drill books as "Assembly of the Trumpeters," and to the army at large as "First Call." Unassisted by other effort, it would rouse nobody, but from far and near the myriad dogs of the post--"mongrel, hound, and cur of low degree"--lift up their canine voices in some indefinable sympathy and stir the winds of the morning with their mournful yowls. Then, when all the garrison gets up cursing and all necessity for rousing is ended, the official reveille begins, sounded by the combined trumpeters, and so, uncheered by concord of sweet sounds, the soldier begins his day.