This, to be sure, helped to soften my first harsh impressions of the place.
Quarters were not very plentiful, and we were compelled to take a house occupied by a young officer of the Ninth.

What base ingratitude it seemed, after the kindness we had accepted from his regiment! But there was no help for it.

We secured a colored cook, who proved a very treasure, and on inquiring how she came to be in those wilds, I learned that she had accompanied a young heiress who eloped with a cavalry lieutenant, from her home in New York some years before.
What a contrast was here, and what a cruel contrast! With blood thinned down by the enervating summer at Tucson, here we were, thrust into the polar regions! Ice and snow and blizzards, blizzards and snow and ice! The mercury disappeared at the bottom of the thermometer, and we had nothing to mark any degrees lower than 40 below zero.

Human calculations had evidently stopped there.

Enormous box stoves were in every room and in the halls; the old-fashioned sort that we used to see in school-rooms and meeting-houses in New England.