"C. S. H. Is that the mark?"

"No, sir. C. S. Hay,' in a diamond. I beg your pardon, but I said Haddison."

"Oh! C. S. A.! Well, I suppose General Torlilye took it for Confederate States of America.”

The bulky youth burst out into such an immoderate fit of laughter, that he upset the camp-stool, upon two legs of which he had been carefully balancing himself, with ill success, for some minutes. Even Colonel Cromwell smiled, half contemptuously, however; and I should have followed the example of the young officer, and disgraced myself on the spot, if fear of my new acquaintance had not suppressed my sense of the ludicrous. The bulky youth whistled gently and remarked, in an undertone, addressed to nobody, "Cheek."

"Sir," said the colonel, "your case is substantially like that of about one million six hundred and fifty-eight thousand others that come here every day. Privately, I don't believe your name is Charles Stuart Addison, or that you are entitled to the protection of the British Government. Ön the contrary, I take you for a rascally speculating blockade-runner and spy, and if I were not adjutant-general of this department, it would give me intense satisfaction to furnish you a practical illustration of a new use for one of the biggest of those boots you tried to bring here for the rebel army. That cotton belongs to Jeff. Davis, and you know it as well as I do. Officially, however, I am bound to tell you that, as you claim to be a British subject and a neutral, any application you may make in writing through the duly accredited and recognized consuls or minister of your government to the Department of State at Washington-will receive the attention it deserves! Good-by, sir. Don't stay long in this department; the climate won't suit you. If I were you, I'd get a comfortable state-room on the first boat for New York, and leave this horrid country just as fast as steam could carry me."

If I repeat all this conversation just as it occurred, please remember, my dear sir, or madam, as the case may be, that 'tis not because I approve the language or manner used by the speakers, but because they spoke and acted as they did. If I meet a man seven feet high, I may not prefer that altitude; indeed, I may regard it with actual aversion, but truth compels me to write him down, or up, just seventy-two inches. Let me confess, that much of what I heard now made my nerves stand on end at the time, though I soon became accustomed to it, and learned to excuse it to some extent, by reason of new circumstances previously unfamiliar to my mind.

The lemon-colored Spaniards, impatient, and wounded in their fine sense of honor at being kept waiting so long, while the scum of creation, as they apparently considered the majority

of those who had preceded them were attended to, folded their cloaks about them, and muttering many unintelligible things to each other, stalked out of the doorway, disdaining to use the window entrance employed by the Yankees.

The two fancily-dressed women in dirty little white onnets, with alarming red and yellow flowers, and decorated with a profusion of cheap finery and paste jewels, sat immovable until everybody else had got through, when, finding that Colonel Cromwell took not the slightest notice of their presence, but seated himself to write, they flounced up to his desk, and attracted his attention with the points of their parasols.

"Well," he said, quietly, without looking up, and continuing to write with the most business-like deliberation.

The pair looked as if they would like to be saucy, but dared not. The colonel having signed his name, and carefully dried the ink on the blotting-paper, pointed with his pen to the bulky youth. "Captain Rolles," he said, "see to these women." I fancied that my quick ear caught on the last word ever so slight an emphasis, as delicate and intangible as the aroma of the onion that has been passed by dainty fingers just once round the edge of the salad-bowl.

The bulky youth addressed as Captain Rolles, having finished the lengthy operation of lighting a cigar, in which he was at the moment engaged, loitered across the room, and between two puffs, without removing the cigar from his lips, gruffly articufated, "What do you want?"

They wanted to go and see their husbands, they said, and brought letters from a Methodist minister in Chicago and the cashier of a bank in Saccarappa, Maine, introducing them to General Bulger, and commending them to his care and attention. Captain Rolles read the letters in a cloud of smoke, and then having folded them up with great pains, in an entirely different way from that in which they had come into his possession, laid them on the colonel's table, and remarked, laconically, "D. B."

"Very well. Send for their husbands to report here."

"Your husbands will come here to see you," said Captain Rolles to the two females. "I'm going to send for them;" and he sat down and scratched off a few lines, with many interlineations and elisions and one huge blot, and presently called out for an orderly. Meanwhile the women turned as white as they conveniently could under two coats of paint, and one of the pair, tossing her head, made for the door, exclaiming that she did not come here to be insulted.

"Orderly !" said Colonel Cromwell, looking up for the first time, "stop those women! Captain Rolles, send to the provost-marslial for an officer and a file of men. Madam," he continued, sternly, rising and turning to the one who had

tossed her head; "do you take us for children? Do you suppose us idiots?"

The woman addressed seemed badly scared, although she managed to titter to her companion that it would be impolite for her to express her opinions before people's faces.

"Look here," said the colonel, fixing his keen gray eyes upon them, and striking the knuckles of his left hand upon the table, where he kept them firmly during the remainder of the interview; "I know you, both of you, better than you think for. There is no such officer in the Two Hundred and Forty-fifth Pennsylvania as Captain Andrew Ferguson. There is no such officer in the Thirty-ninth Maine as Major Jeremiah F. Swett. You are not Mrs. Ferguson "-to the boldest one-"your name is Allison; you are the widow of a dismissed Confederate quartermaster, and you came from Mobile, Alabama, instead of Chicago, Illinois. You"-to the other-"are named Margaret Williams. You are the wife of a captain on one of the Mississippi River packets whose original name was Williams, but who called himself Taliaferro after he had served out his term in the St. Louis penitentiary, where he was sent for robbing the mails. You were banished from New Orleans two months ago, on suspicion of being a spy, and I am now going to send you both to the guard-house on the certainty of being spies! You see I know you !-Rolles, see to this."

The woman whom he had called Margaret Williams had· fainted; but the other, overcome with fear, let her fall like a log at her feet, and made no effort to restore her. A red-faced orderly, exclaiming, "Look at that, now !" rushed out, and in an instant returned with a horse-bucket full of water, and dashed its contents in the face of the prostrate woman, or, for that matter, over her entire body. She revived. An old Spanish negro-wench, sitting outside asleep in the sun, being waked up and impressed into service by the red-faced orderly, Mrs. Williams was soon sufficiently restored to be taken to jail by the provost-guard.

I suppose I must have shown my blank amazement in my face, for the colonel looked at nie with a pleasant smile, and remarked that I must not be astonished at any thing I might see or hear in his office.

"No, sir, I won't," I replied; at which he laughed. So did Captain Rolles.

As fast as one set of applicants thinned out, their places were supplied by another set so exactly similar in every respect, that but for an occasional exception in the way of an original specimen of humanity with a new complaint or a new petition, or an old one supported by a new pretext, you could hardly have distinguished the crowd at one hour of the day from that at other hour.

VOL. IV.-27

"Now, then," said Colonel Cromwell to me, availing himself of a moment, about five o'clock in the afternoon, when the rush seemed to subside, "you are to be my assistant here. I will issue the order to-day. This is Captain Rolles-Rolles, Lieutenant Jenkins-that officer of the Third District of Columbia that we were talking about-got into trouble with the colonel, you remember.-Mr. Jenkins, I want you for the present to read up in our order and letter books, post yourself with regard to the organization of the command, and so on, and in a day or two, when you have become familiar with the office, we will find some regular duty for you. Office hours, nine to three. Nobody works at night here except in unexpected emergencies. We don't have unexpected emergencies often. I hate them. No man is fit for more than six hours of his best work. All over that makes second or third quality of the whole mass. Oh! Here are a few points you must keep constantly in mind. Remember names. Write them correctly, too; no excuse for getting a man's name wrong. Never forget paragraph fourfifty-one Army Regulations, and never let any one else forget it! That's the keystone of the arch. Take nothing for granted. The thing you take for granted is sure to turn out wrong. Never suppose. We keep you to know. Never suppose, Mr. Jenkins; don't let me catch you supposing. Open your eyes and ears, and shut your mouth; and-good-by, gentlemen. I'm going home. By-the-way, dine with me. Six sharp. Good-night."

And so he disappeared from the office, and, mounting a small steel-gray stallion that had been making a terrible noise in the street for the last fifteen minutes, rode at a fast trot down towards the beach road.

I had been taught so much in so short a space of time, that I seemed to know nothing. I can only describe the sensation as a mental dyspepsia. It is not what you swallow, but what you digest, that repairs bodily waste. Nutriment (I do not refer to milk) may be too much condensed. My mind was full to repletion, but could assimilate nothing.

The sight of Captain Rolles standing opposite with his hands extending the outline of his pockets, and grinning in my face, brought my scattered thoughts to a focus. Have you never noticed how, sometimes, when your eyes have been wandering vacantly over the heavens and earth far into infinity, and resting upon nothing, they are caught and riveted by a fly-speck, or a bit of lemon-peel, or the sole of an old boot, or some such impertinent little thing?

"By-the-way, captain," I asked, though nothing could have been further out of the way, "is this the kind of thing they call Fancy Duty?" (Puff. A pause.)

(Puff.) The identical."

"What did you mean by 'D. B.' that time when the colonel handed you the lady's letter to examine?"

The bulky youth smiled broadly, and compassionately, as I thought, and replied, without interrupting his smoke, "D. B." "Yes, I know. But what does it mean?"

"Dead Beat."

"What does that mean?"

"D. B."

"Don't it mean any thing?"

"No! But it's very expressive. It's slang."

BREVET MAJOR-GENERAL HUGH JUDSON KILPATRICK.

Ar the commencement of the war, there was a strong prejudice on the part of Lieutenant-General Scott and the War Department against the cavalry arm of the service. The rebels, on the other hand, appreciating much more correctly than our commanders the necessity and importance of this arm, in the country which was likely to be the scene of battles, and having perhaps a greater natural aptitude for it, since at the South no man walks who can ride, and all prefer the saddle to the carriage, their cavalry became formidable early in the service. Under General McClellan the Union cavalry never attained to any great excellence, not because there was not the matériel for it-matériel which has since been developed into the finest and most efficient light-horse troops in the worldbut because there was no well-directed effort to cultivate and improve that arm of the service. The really efficient cavalry of the Union army dates from the accession of Hooker to high command in the East, and Rosecrans and Grant in the West. Since that period, about January, 1863, it has become a power both in the Eastern and Western armies, and, by their own. acknowledgment, has greatly surpassed the rebel cavalry in dash, discipline, and endurance.

This condition of efficiency is due in a great measure to the ability of some half-dozen of the most prominent cavalry generals, especially Sheridan, Stoneman, Pleasonton, Kilpatrick, Wilson, and the lamented Buford. We have already sketched, briefly, the career of one of them: let us attempt the portrait of another.

HUGH JUDSON KILPATRICK was born in the "Clove" Valley, Northern New Jersey, in 1838. He was the youngest child of his parents. His father was an enterprising and extensive farmer, and his mother a woman of rare culture and endowments. His early advantages of education were excellent, and while yet a boy he exhibited a fondness for military life and