“I say, you naygur,” snorted the Sergeant wrathfully, “you take that baby off my desk and out of this office.  The C. O’s office ain’t no day nursery.”

“You go to grass,” replied Kettle boldly.

The reason for Kettle’s boldness was in sight.  Mrs. McGillicuddy’s majestic figure was seen approaching from the region back of the dining-room, and she had heard the Sergeant’s remark about the C. O.’s office being a day nursery.

“And it’s you, Patrick McGillicuddy,” cried Mrs. McGillicuddy, sailing into the office, “the father of eight children, complaining of this sweet blessed lamb.”

“D’ ye mean the naygur?” asked McGillicuddy.

Mrs. McGillicuddy, scorning to reply, seized the baby, and with Kettle following marched out.  It was not really judicious for the After-Clap to be taken into the C. O.’s office.

The Sergeant began meekly to straighten up his desk, and Colonel Fortescue, coming in later to glance over the evening newspaper, found McGillicuddy gazing meditatively at the Articles of War, lying in a volume on the table.

The Sergeant was not the modern educated non-com, with an eye to a commission, but an old-timer, unlearned in books, but an expert in handling men and horses.

“What is it, Sergeant?” asked the C. O.

“Just this, sir,” replied the Sergeant respectfully, “I was thinkin’ a man ought to be mighty keerful when he picks out a wife.”

“Certainly,” replied the Colonel, gravely, who had exercised no forethought at all, after once falling under the spell of Betty Beverley’s laughing eyes.

“When I got married I didn’t act rash at all, sir, because I’m by nature a timid man,” continued the Sergeant, who was a valiant man, and free.  “I went to a palmist and paid him a dollar for my horrorscope.  I told him I wanted a little woman, about my size, who would follow me around like a poodle dog.  The palmist, he said, sir, he seen a little woman in my hand as would follow me around like a poodle dog.  Then I went to a reg’lar fortune teller, and she told me the same thing, for a dollar.  And I went to a mind reader, the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter, and she promised me the little woman, too.  I bought a dream book and there was the same little woman again, sir.  Within a fortnight after all this I met Araminta Morrarity, as is now Missis Patrick McGillicuddy, and she is six-foot-two-and-three-quarters inches in height, and tipped the scale then at a hundred and ninety-six pounds—­and I’m the lightest man in the regiment.  Missis McGillicuddy has been a good wife, sir—­I ain’t sayin’ a word about that, sir.”

“I should think not,” replied Colonel Fortescue, to whom the Sergeant’s married life was known intimately for nineteen years, “Mrs. McGillicuddy keeps all the soldiers’ wives satisfied and is a boon to the regiment.”