He is a wonderful man, and possessed of a vast and intricate knowledge, but his position in the post is very much like that of a base-ball umpire’s on the field, for he is never thanked if he does well, and is abused by every one on principle. And he is never free. At the very minute he is lifting the green mint to his lips, his host will say, “By-the-way, my striker tells me that last piece of stove-pipe you furnished us does not fit by two inches; I don’t believe you looked at the dimensions;” and when he hastens to join the ladies for protection, he is saluted with an anxious chorus of inquiries as to when he is going to put that pane of glass in the second-story window, and where are those bricks for the new chimney. His worst enemies, however, lie far afield, for he wages constant war with those clerks at the Treasury Department at Washington who go over his accounts and papers, and who take keen and justifiable pride in making him answer for every fraction of a cent which he has left unexplained. The Government, for instance, furnishes his storehouse with a thousand boxes of baking-powder, valued at seventy dollars, or seven cents a box. If he sells three boxes for twenty-five cents--I am quoting an actual instance--the Treasury Department returns his papers, requesting him to explain who got the four cents, and is anxious to know what he means by it. I once saw some tin roofs at a post; they had been broken in coming, and the quartermaster condemned them. That was a year ago, and his papers complaining about these tin roofs have been travelling back and forth between contractor and express agent and the department at Washington and the quartermaster ever since, and they now make up a bundle of _seventy_ different papers. Sometimes the quartermaster defeats the Treasury Department; sometimes it requires him to pay money out of his own pocket. Three revolvers were stolen out of their rack once, and the post quartermaster was held responsible for their loss. He objected to paying the sum the Government required, and pointed out that the revolvers should have been properly locked in the rack. The Government replied that the lock furnished by it was perfect, and not to be tampered with or scoffed at, and that his excuse was puerile. This quartermaster had a mechanic in his company, and he sent for the young man, and told him to go through the barracks and open all the locks he could. At the end of an hour every rack and soldier’s box in the post were burglarized, and the Government paid for the revolvers. [Illustration: UNITED STATES MILITARY POST AT SAN ANTONIO]