A bit of character. Lucy was looking this morning rather helplessly at his silk pajamas, and wondering where he could get them washed, when there entered the tent a handsome and stalwart regular. "Washing?" he inquired respectfully. "Oh," asked Lucy hopefully, "are you an agent for some laundress?" "No," said the man, "I wash them myself. I guarantee to return everything tomorrow, properly done." The boy was not merely surprised, but almost shocked. "_You_ do the work?" he asked. Then his native kindness came to his aid, and he was about to bundle all his clothes into the fellow's hands, when Knudsen said, quietly but very pointedly, "When I'm here at camp I wash my own clothes." David flushed quite pink. "Then I think I'll do the same." "It's good for him," said Knudsen to me afterward. "It's good for him to be called Lucy. It's good for him to learn to shave himself with that razor. I was going to tell him to buy himself a safety razor, but thought I'd better not." I'm glad I left David to find his own nurse. Knudsen manages him with certainty. On the other hand the boy likes him immensely, even though the taciturn Swede does but a small share of the talking when they are together. He is a foundryman, had a hard struggle to establish his growing business, and has in consequence a fierce outlook on the world, as one who at any time may have to fight for his own. David, by persistent but most tactful questioning, has brought out two salient facts in his biography. Knudsen is first the son of an immigrant, talks Swedish in his home, has none of the American background which to David is a man's birthright. And second he is a college man, from Hobart. Over these two facts the boy is sadly perplexed. Legally, Knudsen is as American as the rest of us--but can he be? Socially he is also all right, since he is a college man--but after all can you call Hobart a college? Don't blame David. It's not his fault if he's narrow-minded. I shall close and mail this letter now, and at the first convenient opportunity shall begin the next. I foresee that my letters to you will be practically a continuous performance. Love from DICK. FROM PRIVATE SAMUEL PICKLE TO HIS BROTHER Plattsburg Training Camp. Sunday, Sept. 10, 1916. Say, Tony, what a mutt I was not to get myself jabbed for typhoid before I came here! It would have been worth the money. Today my arm feels like a hornet's nest, with roots up into my shoulder and down my ribs. And my head is light and wavy--that's fever. I saw one guy keel over stiff when the doctor stuck him, and the poor corp of our squad says he'd swap jobs with his rear-rank man if he could only feel like a boy again.