60 
CORRESPONDENCE. 
troopers, and another life was sacrificed on the altar of science. 
The farrier and quartermaster-sergeant offered to dine off an un¬ 
cooked portion of the muscle of the animal, just to prove there 
was no hard feeling, and at the same time expressed their opin¬ 
ion in this manner, that they did not believe in the glanders 
diagnosis. A good scheme if it was adopted among disputing 
practitioners, as it would get some of them off the earth, and 
they never would be missed, blit as it was useless to stack up 
against science in the shape of a hypodermic syringe, a bottle 
of mallein, and a microscope, unknown quantities, by the way, 
in a cavalry regiment in this man’s army, they didn’t call his 
hand. The gall immersion attachment had the •usually intelli¬ 
gent troop commander bluffed, so the unfortunate equus was 
immediately gathered to his fathers. 
Now, to allay any doubt that might remain in the unscien¬ 
tific minds of the sergeant and farrier as to the correctness of 
the diagnosis, a portion of the nasal secretion from the prospec¬ 
tive cadaver was secured, and a culture made on a piece of raw 
spud, and the information given that inside of ten days a beauti¬ 
ful colony of microbes would be on exhibition. The farrier, 
being a man of strong faith, put the now famous potato on a 
shelf in the saddler’s shop and built a roost for the expected 
Mikes. He naturally expected Mikes to hatch out on an Irish 
potato. The culture turned out to be a “sisser,” and the divil 
a microbe ever showed up to use the roost, and of course the 
spud was a dead loss to the troop mess. Some of the members 
of the organization expected the usual lecture and post-mortem 
demonstration in such cases, but he had no time to tarry for 
such foolishness, so he quietly “ hit the trail,” as we say in the 
West, and forgot all about the usual sanitary precautions, con¬ 
sidered necessary in these cases, so anxious was he to conquer 
other fields, and other bacteria. ’Twas not until the Mikes 
failed to come home to roost that the idea commenced to 
percolate through the dandruff of the troop that they had been 
up against a gold brick game. 
We met another worker in the veterinary Sahara. He had 
cultivated an oasis all his own ; none of your nickel-plated 
affairs, but a regular rolled gold arrangement for stamping out 
glanders, warranted to do the business every time, or he didn’t 
want a cent. He was drawing a salary from the Government 
when he should be gazing steadily at the business end of a mule 
for ten hours a day for six days of the week, in a cotton patch ; 
he had a “bunch” of glandered horses in a field, isolated from the 
