“Well, gentlemen,” said the commanding officer (and they perceived a flavor of the official in his tone), “Mr. Albumblatt is just twenty-one. I don't know about you; but I'll never have that excuse again.” “Very well, Captain, we'll be good,” said Mrs. Bainbridge. “And gr-r-ateful,” said Mrs. Starr, rolling her eyes piously. “I prophecy he'll entertain us.” The Captain's demeanor remained slightly official; but walking home, his Catherine by his side in the dark was twice aware of that laugh of his, twinkling in the recesses of his opinions. And later, going to bed, a little joke took him so unready that it got out before he could suppress it. “My love,” said he, “my Second Lieutenant is grievously mislaid in the cavalry. Providence designed him for the artillery.” It was wifely but not right in Catherine to repeat this strict confidence in strictest confidence to her neighbor, Mrs. Bainbridge, over the fence next morning before breakfast. At breakfast Mrs. Bainbridge spoke of artillery reinforcing the post, and her husband giggled girlishly and looked at the puzzled Duane; and at dinner Mrs. Starr asked Albumblatt, would not artillery strengthen the garrison? “Even a light battery,” pronounced Augustus, promptly, “would be absurd and useless.” Whereupon the mess rattled knives, sneezed, and became variously disturbed. So they called him Albumbattery, and then Blattery, which is more condensed; and Captain Duane's official tone availed him nothing in this matter. But he made no more little military jokes; he disliked garrison personalities. Civilized by birth and ripe from weather-beaten years of men and observing, he looked his Second Lieutenant over, and remembered to have seen worse than this. He had no quarrel with the metric system (truly the most sensible), and thinking to leaven it with a little rule of thumb, he made Augustus his acting quartermaster. But he presently indulged his wife with the soldier-cook she wanted at home, so they no longer had to eat their meals in Albumblatt's society; and Mrs. Starr said that this showed her husband dreaded his quartermaster worse than the Secretary of War.