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 lawn in front of it, over which a couple of industrious red-coats were pulling up and down a garden-roller; and in the centre of the drive before the door was a tremendous clump of rhododendrons of more than operatic brilliancy. I leaned on the garden-gate and looked out at the camp: it was twinkling and bustling in the morning light, which drizzled down upon it in patches from a somewhat agitated sky. An hour later the camp got itself together and spread itself, in close battalions and glittering cohorts, over a big green level, where it marched and cantered about most effectively in honor of a lady living at a quiet Scotch country-house. One of this lady's generals stood in a corner, and the regiments marched past and saluted. This simple spectacle was in reality very brilliant. I know nothing about soldiers, as the reader must long since have discovered, but I had, nevertheless, no hesitation in saying to myself that these were the handsomest troops in the world. Everything in such a spectacle is highly picturesque, and if the observer is one of the profane he has no perception of weakness of detail.