"You mean in your set. There must be somebody in this city who gets jolly! there is everywhere, so far as I have travelled. You will find a great many fellows like me, and worse, in the old army. And good reason for it; just think of our life. All of us couldn't have nice places in charge of arsenals, or at Newport, or on Governor's Island. I was five years on the frontier and in California before I got to Baton Rouge; and that was not so very delightful, by the way, in yellow fever seasons. Now imagine yourself in command of a company garrisoning Fort Wallah-Wallah on the upper Missouri, seven hundred miles from an opera, or a library, or a lady, or a mince pie, or any other civilizing influence. The Captain is on detached service somewhere. You are the First Lieutenant, and your only companion is Brown the Second Lieutenant. You mustn't be on sociable terms with the men, because you are an officer and a gentleman. You have read your few books, and talked Brown dry. There is no shooting within five miles of the fort; and if you go beyond that distance, the Blackfeet will raise your hair. What is there to save you from suicide but old-rye? That's one way we come to drink so. You are lucky. You have had no temptations, or almost none, in this little Puritan city." "There are some bad places and people here. I don't speak of it boastingly." "Are there?" laughed Carter. "I'm delighted to hear it, by Jove! When my father went through college here, there wasn't a chance to learn anything wicked but hypocrisy. Chance enough for that, judging from the stories he told me. So old Whitewood is no longer the exact model of all the New Bostonians?" "Not even in the University. There used to be such a solemn set of Professors that they couldn't be recognized in the cemetery because they had so much the air of tombstones. But that old dark-blue lot has nearly died out, and been succeeded by younger men of quite a pleasant cerulean tint. They have studied in Europe. They like Paris and Vienna, and other places that used to be so wicked; they don't think such very small lager of the German theologians; they accept geology, and discuss Darwin with patience." "Don't get out of my range. Who the devil is Darwin? Never mind; I'll take him for granted; go on with your new-school Professors." "Oh, I havn't much to say about them. They are quite agreeable. They are what I call men of the world--though I suppose I hardly know what a man of the world is. I dare say I am like the mouse who took the first dog that he saw for the elephant that he had heard of." The Lieutenant-Colonel stopped his walk and surveyed him, hands in pockets, a smile on his lip, and a silent horse-laugh in his eye.