We Have All Been Taking Turns In Sitting Up Nights During The Illness Of Husband And Wife, And Last Night Three Of Us Were There, Captain Tillman And Faye In One Room, And I With Mrs. White.

It was a terrible night, probably the one that has exacted, or will exact, the greatest self-control, as it was the one before the burial.

In civil life a poor widow can often live right on in her old home, but in the Army, never! Mrs. White will have to give up the quarters just as soon as she and the little baby are strong enough to travel. She has been in a warm climate many years, and her friends are all in the North, so to-morrow a number of us are to commence making warm clothing for her and the children. She has absolutely nothing of the kind, and seems to be pitifully helpless and incapable of thinking for herself.

Soon after I got home this morning and was trying to get a little sleep, I heard screams and an awful commotion across the hall in one of Mrs. Hunt's rooms, and running over to see what was the matter, I found Mrs. Hunt standing upon a chair, and her cook running around like a madman, with a stick of wood in his hand, upsetting furniture and whacking things generally. I naturally thought of a mouse, and not being afraid of them, I went on in and closed the door. I doubt if Mrs. Hunt saw me, she was so intently watching the man, who kept on upsetting things. He stopped finally, and then held up on the wood a snake - a dead rattlesnake! We measured it, and it was over two feet long.

You can see how the house is built by the photograph I sent you, that there are no chimneys, and that the stovepipes go straight up through the pole and sod roof. The children insist that the snake came down the pipe in the liveliest kind of a way, so it must have crawled up the logs to the roof, and finding the warmth of the pipe, got too close to the opening and slipped through. However that may be, he got into the room where the three little children were playing alone. Fortunately, the oldest recognized the danger at once, and ran screaming to her mother, the other two following. Mrs. Hunt was almost ill over the affair, and Major Hunt kept a man on top and around the old house hunting for snakes, until we began to fear it would be pulled down on our heads.

This country itself is bad enough, and the location of the post is most unfortunate, but to compel officers and men to live in these old huts of decaying, moldy wood, which are reeking with malaria and alive with bugs, and perhaps snakes, is wicked. Officers' families are not obliged to remain here, of course.

But at dreadful places like this is where the plucky army wife is most needed.

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