It is true that the commanding officer is supposed to be the most important personage in an army post, but that is not so. He, as well as every one else in it, is ruled by a young person with a brass trumpet, who apparently never sleeps, eats, or rests, and who spends his days tooting on his bugle in the middle of the parade in rainy and in sunny weather and through good and evil report. He sounds in all thirty-seven “calls” a day, and the garrison gets up and lies down, and eats, and waters the horses, and goes to church and school, and to horse exercise, and mounts guard, and drills recruits, and parades in full dress whenever he thinks they should. His prettiest call is reveille, which is sounded at half-past six in the morning. It is bright and spirited, and breathes promise and hope for the new day, and I personally liked it best because it meant that while I still had an hour to sleep, three hundred other men had to get up and clean cold guns and things in the semi-darkness. Next to the bugler in importance is the quartermaster. He is a captain or a first lieutenant with rare executive ability, and it is he who supplies the garrison with those things which make life bearable or luxurious, and it is he who is responsible to the Government for every coat of whitewash on the stables, and for the new stove-lid furnished the cook of N Troop, Thirteenth Cavalry. He is the hardest-worked man in the post, although that would possibly be denied by every other officer in it; and he is supposed to be an authority on architecture, sanitary plumbing, veterinary surgery, household furnishing from the kitchen range to the electric button on the front door, and to know all things concerning martial equipments from a sling-belt to an ambulance.