The party on board was merry enough, and even gay. There was Captain Ogilby, a great, genial Scotchman, and Captain Porter, a graduate of Dublin, and so charmingly witty. He seemed very devoted to Miss Wilkins, but Miss Wilkins was accustomed to the devotion of all the officers of the Eighth Infantry. In fact, it was said that every young lieutenant who joined the regiment had proposed to her. She was most attractive, and as she had too kind a heart to be a coquette, she was a universal favorite with the women as well as with the men. There was Ella Bailey, too, Miss Wilkins' sister, with her young and handsome husband and their young baby. Then, dear Mrs. Wilkins, who had been so many years in the army that she remembered crossing the plains in a real ox-team. She represented the best type of the older army woman--and it was so lovely to see her with her two daughters, all in the same regiment. A mother of grown-up daughters was not often met with in the army. And Lieutenant-Colonel Wilkins, a gentleman in the truest sense of the word--a man of rather quiet tastes, never happier than when he had leisure for indulging his musical taste in strumming all sorts of Spanish fandangos on the guitar, or his somewhat marked talent with the pencil and brush. The heat of the staterooms compelled us all to sleep on deck, so our mattresses were brought up by the soldiers at night, and spread about. The situation, however, was so novel and altogether ludicrous, and our fear of rats which ran about on deck so great, that sleep was well-nigh out of the question. Before dawn, we fled to our staterooms, but by sunrise we were glad to dress and escape from their suffocating heat and go on deck again. Black coffee and hard-tack were sent up, and this sustained us until the nine-o'clock breakfast, which was elaborate, but not good. There was no milk, of course, except the heavily sweetened sort, which I could not use: it was the old-time condensed and canned milk; the meats were beyond everything, except the poor, tough, fresh beef we had seen hoisted over the side, at Cape St. Lucas. The butter, poor at the best, began to pour like oil. Black coffee and bread, and a baked sweet potato, seemed the only things that I could swallow.