“Home, James,” I murmured, as I was slowly towed to shore.  Just before closing my eyes I caught a fleeting glimpse of a young lady clad in one of the one-piecest one-piece bathing suits I had ever seen.  She was bending over me sympathetically.

“Private property!” cried my tormentor, shaking a finger at me.  “What a pity!” I thought as I closed my eyes and drifted off into sweet dreams in which Mr. Fogerty, my beautiful rescuer, and myself were dancing hand-and-hand on the parade ground to the music of the massed band, much to the edification of the entire station assembled in review formation.

Presently I awoke to the hateful strains of this old hard-shell’s voice: 

“See what you’ve done!” she was saying to the young girl.  “You’ve brought in a half naked man, and now that he has seen you in a much worse condition than he is, we’ll have ten thousand sailors swimming out to this island in one continuous swarm.”

“Oh, won’t that be fun!” cried the girl.  And from that time on, in spite of the objections of her mother, we were fast friends.

When I returned to shore it was in a rowboat with this fair young creature.  The faithful Fogerty was waiting on the beach for me, where, it later developed, he had been sleeping quite comfortably on an unknown woman’s high powered sport hat, as is only reasonable.

July 2nd. Mother got in again.  There seems to be no practical way of keeping her out.  This time she came breezing in with a friend from East Aurora, a large, elderly woman of about one hundred and ten summers and an equal number of very hard winters.  The first thing mother said was to the effect that she was going to see what she could do about getting me a rating.  She did.  The very first officer she saw she sailed up to and buttonholed much to my horror.

“Why can’t my boy Oswald have a pretty little eagle on his arm, such as I see so many of the young men up here wearing about the camp?”

The abruptness of this question left the officer momentarily stunned, but I will say for him that he rallied quickly and returned a remarkably diplomatic reply to the effect that the pretty little eagle, although pleasing to gaze upon, was not primarily intended to be so much of a decoration as means of identification, and that certain small qualifications were required, as a rule, before one was permitted to wear one of the emblems in question; qualifications, he hastened to add, which he had not the slightest doubt that I failed to possess if I was the true son of my mother, but which, owing to fate and circumstances, I had probably been unable to exercise.  Whereupon he bid her a very courteous good-day, returned my salute, and passed on, but not before the very old lady accompanying my mother saluted also, raising her hand to her funny bit of a bonnet with unnecessary snappiness and snickering in a senile manner.  This last episode upset me completely, but the old lady was irrepressible.