"Yes," and Smithy's voice was scorn embodied, "and got there first." "Not quite that," replied the sergeant in tones of butter smoothness. "We raised it and took it right with us."

"But as I was saying," the little trumpeter warmed to his work, "the Buffalers was having some fun with the Tontos, or vice versa. Them coons is good soldiers, if they are coons, jimdandy of Caroline good soldiers."

"There you go again, praising them niggers. You make me tired." Hawkins was from Maryland, with a Marylander's well known feelings about negroes.

"I don't think any of the fellers who was with Thornburg at Milk river, or who went with 'Old Wes' (Gen. Merritt) to pull him out of his hole, has any particular call to do otherwise. And it seems to me that I've heard you say you was with one or t'other of 'em, to say nothing of our drink together that night in the trenches." How Smithy's words did cut. A man was a man to him.

This was crossing the bounds of regulation repartee, josh or come back, as the men called it, and opened an old and unhealed wound, for even in the army of the Union, Mason and Dixon's line is still a divider of some things, and Hawkins' father had owned slaves and wore the grey, while Smithy's had fought the fugitive slave law and worn the blue. The sergeant being a native of Germany rather inclined to the ideas of Smithy. The flag is one, but ideas of sentiment are several. So the sargeant, noting the drift of things, broke in with:

"A Buffaler ain't a nigger; he's a soldier, if he is black, and a blamed good one, too; so shut your yawp, both of you, and talk sense. Go on about Sorrel Top and the Buffaler, Smithy."

"As I was saying," resumed Smithy, something of the fire still left in his voice and manner, "the Tontos was having some fun with the bureau regulations and the settlers, and as is usual, not to say natural, the Buffalers was having some fun with the Tontos. And sometimes the Tontos was having some fun with the Buffalers which is also usual and natural and quite familiar to us fellers here, all three of us."

Grunts and nods from the other sol

diers acknowledged this little item of personal history, though the unusual tension. still being on, nothing was said.

"It came to pass, as the chaplain's regulations say," Smithy went on, "that one day Sorrel Top, who was a youngster then, almost a shavetail, and a sub. in the Coon Ninth-they called him Sorrel Top .because his top knot was a few shades better than the color of his troop mounts, which was sorrel____"

"We used to call Lieutenant Harris Cotton Tail because his hair was as white as the last end of a Molly under the brush pile," interrupted the sergeant.

"Sorrel Top," went on Smithy, not heeding the interruption, "he started out with a handful of the Buffalers to have some fun with the Tontos, and by and by the Tontos started in to have fun with him. Then he knew they was somewhere about six or ten to one of his, for that's Tontos' tactics."

"Say, Major," broke in the sergeant, "get Smithy to tell you about how Striker arrested the buck in old Quonothay's camp. It was a hundred to one there." And Smithy smiled, for Captain Striker was his troop commander at one stage of his long career, but his frown was fierce and heavy, despite the momentary smile. as he rebuked his bunkie.

""Tenshun! I'm a-telling this, and it's about Sorrel Top. But as I was a-saying, Major," Smithy turned to me with elaborate gesture, "them was Tonto tactics. They had him corralled about as quick as a bunch of Texas cowboys round up a maverick, and thought they were going to have a good time. It was a rocky canyon side, and he managed to get in a cave and put up a wall of loose stones in front. The coon, who was a sergeant and in charge of a part of the line, got a bit reckless, and got plugged and went over the works. How those naked, bang-haired, bead-eyed, lead-spitting devils did yell when he went over. And they weren't slow about pumping lead and arrows at him, either. But the poor devil no sooner reached ground level than over went Sorrel Top after him, picked him up and lifted him over where the other Buffalers were ready to take him. And then came Sorrel Top, with one boot heel shot off and a whole vacant lot of close calls. It was a job, too, for the coon

N THE PAST few years it has become an universally recognized mark of artistic distinction in the musical and dramatic world to have appeared in the Greek Theatre of the University of California. The privilege of gracing the concrete boards has been reserved to the very cream of the professional talent which has visited the Pacific Coast. Petschnikoff and his wife, and Damrosch's Orchestra,

have played there; Gadski, SchumanHeinck, and Bispham have sung there; William H. Crane's coterie of stars has carried on its tables and chairs through square-hewn entrances to a barren stage; Maude Adams has portrayed the invertebrate ambitions of the son of Napoleon; and Bernhardt has exclaimed after her presentation of Racine's "Phaedre" with a setting of fresh-cut greens and classic stone: "It was my best. I was carried beyond myself by the noble inspiration of the Greek stage."

Just four years before the production of

Sophocles, Aeschylus, Shudraka, Ben Jonson and Shakespeare.

"The House of Rimmon" is based on the scriptural incident of the healing of the leprosy of Naaman, the Syrian chieftain, about which the author has weaved a story of romance and tragedy. In pre

doors in the Holy Land," as "a long journey in the spirit and a short one in the body."

The biblical basis upon which the play has been erected consists of but a single chapter in the second book of Kings. By judicious employment of the elements of

monotheistic creed is always in evidence. The initial scene is laid at the Court of Damascus at the period of the decline of the Syrian power. With political supremacy has come the naturally attendant disposition toward indulgence in pomp and splendor and riotous living. The riotous living. The

a clandestine attachment, meet to plot against the Captain. Rezon tells of his secret conference with the Assyrian envoys who have promised immunity the nobles, death to Naaman and unlimited power to Rezon, if he will persuade the King to deliver the city into the enemy's