The most surprising thing about the frontier army posts, to my mind, was the amount of comfort and the number of pretty trifles one found in the houses, especially when one considered the distance these trifles--such as billiard-tables for the club or canteen, and standing-lamps for the houses on the line--had come. At several dinners, at posts I had only reached after two days’ journey by stage, the tables were set exactly as they would have been in New York City with Sherry’s men in the kitchen. There were red candle-shades, and salted almonds and ferns in silver centre-pieces, and more forks than one ever knows what to do with, and all the rest of it. I hope the army people will not resent this, and proudly ask, “What did he expect to find?” but I am sure that is not the idea of a frontier post we have received in the East. There was also something delightfully novel in the table-talk, and in hearing one pretty, slight woman, in a smart _décolleté_ gown, casually tell how her husband and his men had burned the prairie grass around her children and herself, and turned aside a prairie fire that towered and roared around them, and another of how her first child had been seized with convulsions in a stage-coach when they were snow-bound eighty miles from the post and fifty miles from the nearest city, and how she borrowed a clasp-knife from one of the passengers with which he had been cutting tobacco, and lanced the baby’s gums, and so saved his life. There was another hostess who startled us by saying, cheerfully, that the month of June at her last post was the most unpleasant in the year, because it was so warm that it sometimes spoiled the ice for skating, and that the snow in April reached to the sloping eaves of the house; also the daughter of an Indian fighter, while pouring out at a tea one day, told calmly of an Indian who had sprung at her with a knife, and seized her horse’s head, and whom she had shaken off by lashing the pony on to his hind legs. She could talk the Sioux language fluently, and had lived for the greater part of her life eight hundred miles from a railroad. Is it any wonder you find all the men in an army post married when there are women who can adapt themselves as gracefully to snow-shoes at Fort Brady as to the serious task of giving dinners at Fort Houston?