The American private, as he showed himself during the three days in which I was his guest, and afterwards, when Captain Hardie had returned and we went scouting together, proved to be a most intelligent and unpicturesque individual. He was intelligent, because he had, as a rule, followed some other calling before he entered the service, and he was not picturesque, because he looked on “soldiering” merely as a means of livelihood, and had little or no patriotic or sentimental feeling concerning it. This latter was not true of the older men. They had seen real war either during the rebellion or in the Indian campaigns, which are much more desperate affairs than the Eastern mind appreciates, and they were fond of the service and proud of it. One of the corporals in G Troop, for instance, had been honorably discharged a year before with the rank of first sergeant, and had re-enlisted as a private rather than give up the service, of which he found he was more fond than he had imagined when he had left it. And in K Troop was an even more notable instance in a man who had been retired on three-fourths pay, having served his thirty years, and who had returned to the troop to act as Captain Hunter’s “striker,” or man of all work, and who bore the monotony of the barracks and the hardships of field service rather than lose the uniform and the feeling of _esprit de corps_ which thirty years’ service had made a necessity to him. But the raw recruit, or the man in his third or fourth year, as he expressed himself in the different army posts and among the companies I met on the field, looked upon his work from a purely business point of view. He had been before enlistment a clerk, or a compositor, a cowboy, a day-laborer, painter, blacksmith, book-canvasser, almost everything. In Captain Hardie’s troop all of these were represented, and the average of intelligence was very high. Whether the most intelligent private is the best soldier is a much-discussed question which is not to be discussed here, but these men were intelligent and were good soldiers, although I am sure they were too independent in their thoughts, though not in their actions, to have suited an officer of the English or German army. That they are more carefully picked men than those found in the rank and file of the British army can be proved from the fact that of those who apply for enlistment in the United States but twenty per cent. are chosen, while in Great Britain they accept eighty and in some years ninety per cent. of the applicants. The small size of our army in comparison, however, makes this showing less favorable than it at first appears.