I recall the chagrin I felt on the Plains one day, when one of our Seventh Cavalry officers, with whom we had long been intimately associated--one whom our people called "Fresh Smith," or "Smithie," for short--came to his wife to get her to put on his coat. I said something in bantering tones of his Plains life making him look on his wife as the Indian looks upon the squaw, and tried to rouse her to rebellion. There was a small blaze, a sudden scintillation from a pair of feminine eyes, that warned me of wrath to come. The captain accepted my banter, threw himself into the saddle, laughed back the advantage of this new order of things, where a man had a combination, in his wife, of servant and companion, and tore out of sight, leaving me to settle accounts with the flushed madame. She told me, what I never knew, and perhaps might not even now, but for the outburst of the moment, that in the war "Smithie" had received a wound that shattered his shoulder, and though his arm was narrowly saved from amputation, he never raised it again, except a few inches. As for putting on his coat, it was an impossibility. One day in New York my husband and I were paying our usual homage to the shop windows and to the beautiful women we passed, when he suddenly seized my arm and said, "There's Kiddoo! Let's catch up with him." I was skipped over gutters, and sped over pavements, the General unconscious that such a gait is not the usual movement of the New Yorker, until we came up panting each side of a tall, fine-looking man, apparently a specimen of physical perfection. The look of longing that he gave us as we ran up, flushed and happy, startled me, and I could scarcely wait until we separated, to know the meaning. It was this: General Joseph B. Kiddoo, shot in the leg during the war, had still the open wound, from which he endured daily pain and nightly torture, for he got only fragmentary sleep. To heal the hurt was to end his life, the surgeons said. When at last I heard he had been given release and slept the blessed sleep, what word of sorrow could be framed?