“Doggone if I can solve it,” he chuckled, turning away and shaking his head; “it’s just simply too much for me.”

He looked back once, clapped his hands over his mouth and proceeded merrily on his way.  I am glad of course to be able to bring joy into the lives of sailors, but I did not enlist for that sole purpose.  Returning to the cigar butt, however, I was really quite disappointed.  I do so want to make a name for myself in the service that I would eagerly jump at the chance of sailing up the Kiel canal in a Barnegat Sneak Box were it not for the fact that sailing always makes me deathly sick.  I don’t know why it is, but the more I have to do with water the more reasons I find for shunning it.  The cigar butt episode broke my heart though.  I was all keyed up for some heroic deed—­what an anti-climax!  I left the spot in a bitter, humiliated mood.  There is only one comforting part about the whole affair—­I did not pick up that cigar butt.  He did, I’ll bet, though when nobody was looking.  I don’t know as I blame him—­there were still several healthy drags left in it.

June 11th. This war is going to put a lot of Chinamen out of business if it keeps up much longer.  The first thing a sailor will do after he has been paid off will be to establish a laundry, and he won’t be a slouch at the business at that.  I feel sure that I am qualified right now to take in family laundry and before the end of summer I guess I’ll be able to do fancy work.  At present I am what you might call a first class laundryman, but I’m not a fancy laundryman yet.  Since they’ve put us in whites I go around with the washer-woman’s complaint most of the time.  Terrible shooting pains in my back!  My sympathy for the downtrodden is increasing by leaps and bounds.  I can picture myself without any effort of the imagination bending over a tub after the war doing the family washing while my wife is out running for alderman or pulling the wires to be appointed Commissioner of the Docks.  The white clothes situation, however, is serious.  It seems that every spare moment I have I am either washing or thinking of washing or just after having washed, and to one who possesses as I do the uncanny faculty of being able to get dirtier in more places in the shortest space of time than any ten street children picked at random could ever equal, life presents one long vista of soap and suds.

[Illustration:  “THIS WAR IS GOING TO PUT A LOT OF CHINAMEN OUT OF BUSINESS”]

“You boys look so cute in your funny white uniforms,” a girl said to me the other day.  “It must be so jolly wearing them.”

I didn’t strike her, for she was easily ten pounds heavier than I was, but I made it easily apparent that our relations would never progress further than the weather vane.  I used to affect white pajamas, the same seeming to harmonize with the natural purity of my nature, but after the war I fear I shall be forced to discontinue the practise in favor of more lurid attire.  However, I still believe that a bachelor should never wear anything other than white pajamas or at the most lavender, but this of course is merely a personal opinion.