Yours ’till the Klown Quince sings the Star Spangled Banner.

Barney.

[Illustration:  “An’ Bill The Twicer wuz fool enuff to fall fer Theo’s bunk”]

Camp Wadsworth.

Dere Julie:—­

Well, ol’ girl, you can see by the heading of this that we have gone south.  The plentifullest things down here is “dinges”, mules and mud, and you very seldom see one without the other.  You know Julie “Birds of a fether gathers no moss”; sumpin like that anyhow; you know Julie I was never much on problems.  I see a big lazy dinge yesterday asleep against a corner of the barracks when the bugle blowed the mess call; he woke up in time to hear the last notes; stretching himself and scratching his bed, he said:  “Dar she blows, dinner time for white folks, but just 12 o’clock for niggers.”

Well Julie, you can bet your Wrigleys and every hair on your bureau, that what Sherman said about war is right; its easy to get in an’ hard to get out.  Reminds me of the story my ol’ man tells about when he lived on a farm (You know Julie dere, I told you my old man was raised on a farm in Brooklin, N.Y.U.S.A.).  He stuck his bean into a yoke, to teach a yearling calf to work double, and the way that calf started to hot foot it to the other end of Long Island was some exhibition of speed.  He could have give the Empire State express a ten mile start at Peekskill and beat it into Powkeepsy.  He yanked my ol’ man along so fast that his feet only struck the ground every other mile.  If the calf had run around in a circle, my ol’ man could have spit in his own face.  His coat tail stuck out so straight behind you could have played a game of peaknuckle on it.  Finally the o’ man got hep that he wasn’t gonna be able to break the calf before the calf broke my ol’ man’s neck so he yelled out, “here we come, dum our fool souls, somebody hed us off.”  So Julie, see if somebody bobs up who is able and willin to stop this little unpleasentness, let him go to it like a sick kitten to a hot rock.

Member Julie that song we all usto sing comin home on the boat after a picnic at Staten Island of the Patrick Dooley East Side Outing and Chowder Club?  You know Julie—­The chorus ends with Beans!  Beans!  Beans!  Say kid, that song would fit in this camp like a hungry tramp at a chicken dinner.  Every farmer in the good ol’ U.S.A. must have planted nothing but beans for the last two years.  We have ’em boiled fer breakfast, baked fer dinner, and in the soup for supper.  Every time the Chaplin (not Charlie) says grace, he always “Thanks the Lord for these tokens of his grace,” and Skinny got forty-ate hours in the booby hatch fer askin me real loud like, so everybody could hear him to “please put some of them tokens on his plate.”

[Illustration:  “Dinner fer white folks, but jest 12 o’clock fer niggers—­“]