Bare—stark naked—calcimined walls, grim in their poverty and unashamed; bare pine floors; cheap pine trimmings covered with hideous varnish, the gloss of which seemed an uncaring grin; the whole sparsely strewn with Government-contract furniture, feeble in the beginning and now in the last stages of pathetic senility. This was the quarters for unmarried employees. And when you take such a scene and thoroughly impregnate it with the clinging atmosphere of yesterday’s, and last week’s, and last year’s boiled mutton; animate it with characters gathered by the grab-bag method from the forty-eight States, persons warped and narrowed by their monotonous duties, impressed by the savage rather than impressing him, fulsome with petty gossip and radiating a cheap evangelical virtue, you have the indescribable—and invariable—locale of an isolated desert school. Dickens would have made it immortal, and his gallery of portraits would have gained many varieties of Bumbles and Mr. Chucksters and Sairey Gamps. I have walked in the Desert with Dick Swiveller and Mr. Cheggs; Mark Tapley I have known intimately; and I have dined several times with Pecksniff in the flesh, he lacking only a large shirt-collar to complete the picture. Hugh Walpole has glimpsed something similar to this in The Gods and Mr. Perrin. “It will be all right next term” is the fiscal cry of the restless, unsatisfied, and for the most part misfitted employees of the Indian Service. And the Indian stands mute, inarticulate, unable to express his confused amazement at this bizarre and ever-changing exhibition. A strong sense of humor may keep one from going mad, but even the keenest humor grows blunted after a few months of such stolid association. If one has no relief in other mental pursuits, he succumbs finally to a moroseness that is not good in the unchanging, uncaring Desert. We sat at a belated meal in the dining-hall. The drive of twenty odd miles and the tang of the desert air had given me an unusual appetite that promised the making of weight, when behold! in the doorway giving on to the kitchen appeared a vision, perhaps I should say an apparition, the cook! The expression turned on me was intended, I have no doubt, to be one of welcome; but whatever it was supposed to register, I have never forgotten the sardonic leer of that unkempt individual, promising worse to come. And it arrived. Leathery mutton, cold; baking-powder biscuit, lacking character; coffee, lukewarm, weakly concocted from the Arbuckle blend that retreated westward after the Civil War; milk, fresh from tin-plate Holsteins, mixed with water from an alkali pump; and last, but not least for a sick man’s stomach, the “bull butter,” innocent of ice, slimy, having the flavor of kerosene. Farewell! a long farewell to Maryland cooking!