Oh, it is wonderful here, aunty dear, just paradise!  Oh, if you could only see it! everything so wild and lovely; such grand plains, stretching such miles and miles and miles, all the most delicious velvety¹ sand and sage-brush, and rabbits as big as a dog, and such tall and noble jackassful ears that that is what they name them by; and such vast mountains, and so rugged² and craggy and lofty, with cloud-shawls wrapped around their shoulders, and looking so solemn and awful and satisfied; and the charming Indians, oh, how you would dote on them, aunty dear, and they would on you, too, and they would let you hold their babies, the way they do me, and they are the fattest, and brownest, and sweetest little things, and never cry, and wouldn’t if they had pins sticking in them, which they haven’t, because they are poor and can’t afford it; and the horses and mules³ and cattle and dogs—hundreds and hundreds and hundreds, and not an animal that you can’t do what you please with, except uncle Thomas, but I don’t mind him, he’s lovely; and oh, if you could hear the bugles⁴: too—too—too-too—too—too, and so on—perfectly beautiful!  Do you recognize that one?  It’s the first toots of the reveille; it goes, dear me, so early in the morning!—then I and every other soldier on the whole place are up and out in a minute, except uncle Thomas, who is most unaccountably lazy, I don’t know why, but I have talked to him about it, and I reckon it will be better, now.  He hasn’t any faults much, and is charming and sweet, like Buffalo⁵ Bill, and Thunder-Bird, and Mammy Dorcas, and Soldier Boy, and Shekels, and Potter, and Sour-Mash, and—well, they’re all that, just angels, as you may say.