Fort Sam Houston at San Antonio is one of the three largest posts in the country, and is in consequence one of the heavens towards which the eyes of the army people turn. It is only twenty minutes from the city, and the weather is mild throughout the year, and in the summer there are palm-trees around the houses; and white uniforms--which are unknown to the posts farther north, and which are as pretty as they are hard to keep clean--make the parade-ground look like a cricket-field. They have dances at this post twice a month, the regimental band furnishing the music, and the people from town helping out the sets, and the officers in uniforms with red, white, and yellow stripes. A military ball is always very pretty, and the dancing-hall at Houston is decorated on such occasions with guidons and flags, and palms and broad-leaved plants, which grow luxuriously everywhere, and cost nothing. I went directly from this much-desired post to the little one at Oklahoma City, which is a one-company post, and where there are no semi-monthly dances or serenades by the band; but where, on the other hand, the officers do not stumble over an enlisted man at every step who has to be saluted, and who stands still before them, as though he meant to “hold them up” or ask his way, until he is recognized. The post at Oklahoma City is not so badly off, even though it is built of logs and mud, for the town is near by, and the men get leave to visit it when they wish. But it serves to give one an idea of the many other one-company posts scattered in lonely distances along the borders of the frontier, where there are no towns, and where every man knows what the next man is going to say before he speaks--single companies which the Government has dropped out there, and which it has apparently forgotten, as a man forgets the book he has tucked away in his shelf to read on some rainy day. They will probably find they are remembered when the rainy days come. Fort Sill, in the Oklahoma Territory, is one of the eight-company posts. I visited several of these, and liked them better than those nearer the cities; but then I was not stationed there. The people at these smaller isolated posts seem to live more contentedly together. There is not enough of them to separate into cliques or sets, as they did at the larger stations, and they were more dependent one upon another. There was a night when one officer on the line gave a supper, and another (one of his guests) said he wished to contribute the cigars. There had not been an imported cigar in that post for a year at least, and when Captain Ellis brought in a fresh box with _two_ paper stamps about it, and the little steamer engraved on the gray band met our eyes, and we knew they had paid the customs duty, there was a most unseemly cheer and undignified haste to have the box opened. And then each man laid his cigar beside his plate, and gazed and sniffed at it, and said “Ah!” and beamed on every one