“Among my visitors was an old captain of the rough school of military habit, with all the dry jokes of the recruiting service, and all the coarseness which a life spent for the most part in remote stations, and small detachments, is sure to impart. This old fellow, Mat Hubbart, a well known name in the Glengarries, had the greatest partiality for practical jokes--and could calculate to a nicety, the precise amount of a liberty which any man’s rank in the service permitted, without the risk of being called to account: and the same scale of equivalents, by which he established the nomenclature for female rank in the army, was regarded by him as the test for those licences he permitted himself to take with any man beneath him: and as he spoke of the colonel’s ‘lady,’ the major’s ‘wife,’ the captain’s ‘woman,’ the lieutenant’s ‘thing’--so did he graduate his conduct to the husbands--never transgressing for a moment on the grade, by any undue familiarity, or any unwonted freedom. With me, of course, his powers were discretionary--or rather, had no discretion whatever. I was a kind of military outlaw, that any man might shoot at--and certainly, he spared not his powder in my behalf. “Among the few reliques of my Indian life, was a bear-skin cap and hood, which I prised highly. It was a present from my old guide--his parting gift--when I put into his hands the last few pieces of silver I possessed in the world. This was then to me a thing, which, as I had met with not many kindnesses in the world, I valued at something far beyond its mere price; and would rather have parted with any, or everything I possessed, than lose it. Well, one day on my return from a fishing excursion, as I was passing the door of the mess-room, what should I see but a poor idiot that frequented the barrack, dressed in my bear-skin. “‘Holloa! Rokey,’ said I, ‘where did you get that?’ scarce able to restrain my temper. “‘The captain gave it me,’ said the fellow, touching his cap, with a grateful look towards the mess-room window, where I saw Captain Hubbart standing, convulsed with laughter. “‘Impossible!’ said I--yet half-fearing the truth of his assertion. ‘The Captain couldn’t give away what’s mine, and not his.’ “‘Yes, but he did though,’ said the fool, ‘and told me, too, he’d make me the “talk man” with the Indians, if you didn’t behave better in future.’