“I know, my child,” the mother said.  “The parting makes me sad,
     But go you must away and fight the war. 
   At least you will not live to drink as much as did your dad—­
     So here’s your lid, my lad, and there’s the door.”

       Then as he turned away
       He heard her softly say: 

   CHORUS

   “The sailors I have ever loved.  I’m glad my lad’s a gob,
     Although it seems to me he’s much too dumb. 
   But after all perhaps he isn’t such an awful slob—­
     I always knew that Kaiser was a bum!”

Aug. 9th. The best way to make a deserter of a man is to give him too much liberty.  For the past week I have been getting my dog Fogerty on numerous liberty lists when he shouldn’t have been there, but not contented with that he has taken to going around with a couple of yeomen, and the first thing I know he will be getting on a special detail where the liberty is soft.  I put nothing past that dog since he lost his head to some flop-eared huzzy with a black and tan reputation.

Aug. 10th. All day long and a little longer I have been carrying sacks of flour.  The next time I see a stalk of wheat I am going to snarl at it.  This new occupation is a sort of special penance for not having my hammock lashed in time.  It seems that I have been in the service long enough to know how to do the thing right by now, but the seventh hitch is a sly little devil and always gets me.  I need a longer line or a shorter hammock, but the only way out of it that I can see is to get a commission and rate a bed.

[Illustration:  “I CARRIED ALL THE FLOUR TO-DAY THAT WAS RAISED LAST YEAR IN THE SOUTHERN SECTION OF THE STATE OF MONTANA”]

I carried all the flour to-day that was raised last year in the southern section of the State of Montana, and I was carrying it well and cheerfully until one of my pet finger nails (the one that the manicure girls in the Biltmore used to rave about) thrust itself through the sack and precipitated its contents upon myself and the floor.  A commissary steward when thoroughly aroused is a poisonous member of society.  One would have thought that I had sunk the great fleet the way this bird went on about one little sack of flour.

“Here Mr. Hoover works hard night and day all winter,” he sobs at me, “and you go spreading it around as if you were Marie Antoinette.”

I wondered what new scandal he had about Marie Antoinette, but I held my peace.  My horror was so great that the real color of my face made the flour look like a coat of sunburn in comparison.

“There’s enough flour there,” he continued reproachfully, pointing to the huge mound of stuff in which I stood like a lost explorer on a snow-capped mountain peak and wishing heartily that I was one, “there’s enough flour,” he continued, “to keep a chief petty officer in pie for twenty-four hours.”

“Just about,” thought I to myself.