One day I received a letter from home, saying that my father, mother and sister were coming east and would pay me a visit. I wrote at once and said that I would be delighted to see them any time after the fifteenth of July, but not before then, as I would be too busy to see much of them. The fact was I would not get out of confinement before the fifteenth of July, but I did not tell them. They came the latter part of July, and we were delighted to be together several hours every day during the visit. They were charmed with the beauty of the place, and my mother said when I returned home next year that I need not take my trunk in the back yard again to open it, for now that she had seen what a sweet and clean place West Point was she was satisfied there were no bedbugs there. There is a good deal of cactus, of the prickly pear variety, growing on the hills about the Point, and one day when B⸺m’s father and mother were there from Cincinnati they wanted some to take home with them, and Mr. B⸺m kindly offered to send some to my father, if I wished him to. Of course I wished it. I expected the folks at home to speak about receiving the cactus, hence I did not refer to it for a long time, and when I did my mother told me not to speak of it to my father, as he was very angry about the cactus. It appeared that Mr. B⸺m put it in a box and sent it prepaid to my father, and as he supposed that I had written about it, he did not write. My father opened the box and not knowing anything about cactus, he took it cautiously in his hands, with the natural painful results. He dropped the cactus, and, as luck went, he rubbed his hands on his face and neck, and they too became filled with the stickers. Just across the south line of cadet limits in my day was Kinsley’s apple orchard, and many a cadet run it there for apples. One day Mr. Kinsley, himself an old graduate of the Academy, caught several cadets in his orchard, so he hitched up at once and drove to the superintendent’s office to report the case. The superintendent said that if Mr. Kinsley could identify the cadets they should be punished; he said he could identify them. So when the battalion was formed Mr. Kinsley passed down the line, but failed to identify them, for the reason, he said, that all cadets looked alike.