[Sidenote:  Time is passed navigating, standing watch, sleeping.]

Things are the same as before with us.  Time passes quickly, with navigating, standing watch and sleeping when you get a chance.  One day or two passes all too quickly.  I wish there were more to do in the shape of relaxation when we do get ashore.  The people here are cordial enough, according to their lights, but those that we meet are practically all Army and Navy people, who have no abode here themselves and are almost as much strangers as we are; and there is no resident population of that caste that would ordinarily open its doors to foreign naval officers.

[Sidenote:  Little for diversion in Ireland.]

Ireland is a poor country comparatively.  A town of 50,000 here shows less in the way of facilities for diversion than the average town of 10,000 in the States.

[Sidenote:  Mental privations hurt more than physical ones.]

Don’t worry about my privations—­“which mostly there ain’t none.”  Such as they are, they are necessary and unavoidable; and, above all, we are fitted for them.  You can’t well sympathize with a man who is doing the thing he has longed for and trained for all his life.  Besides, physical privations are nothing; it is the mental ones that hurt.  A soldier in the trenches, with little to eat and nothing but a hole to sleep in, can feel happy all the same—­particularly if life has something in prospect for him if he lives.  But a man out of work at home, sleeping in the park and panhandling for food, is much more to be pitied, though his immediate hardships may be no greater.

The weather over here is very passable at present, but they say it is simply hell off the coast in winter.  However, somebody said the war will be over in November.  I hope the Kaiser and Hindenburg know it, too!

JULY 26.

[Sidenote:  Anxious to be in action.]

I haven’t done anything heroic, which irks me.  We would like to get in on the ground floor, while all hands are in a receptive mood, and before the Plattsburgers and other such death-defying supermen make it too common.

JULY 22.

[Sidenote:  A cheerful letter from home.]

Your two letters of July 7 and 8 came this afternoon, but I got the latter first and expected from what you said in contrition that there was hot stuff—­gas-attack followed by bayonet-work—­in the former; therefore I was all the more ashamed to find you had dealt so leniently and squarely with me.  Why didn’t you come back with a long invoice of troubles of your own, as 99 per cent of women would?  Evidently you are the one-per-cent woman.  I bitterly regretted my whines after having written them, for their very untruth.  Alas, how many people think the world is drab-colored and life a failure, and so have done or said something they regret all their