Such a humiliation today! And such a discovery! I suppose you didn't tell me that Dick was here because you thought I'd prefer not to know it. We're perfectly aware of each other's neighborhood now. This is the way of it. This afternoon, being tired of the continual drilling on the parade ground, I slipped away before it could begin, and leaving the Colonel at his nap, went walking out a gravel road that I've for some time wished to explore. It took me along a rather desolate tract of scrub land, with nothing ahead but the distant Adirondacks; so at last, seeing a little hill to the left, I thought I'd try if I could see the lake from it, and perhaps sit there awhile in quiet. I struck out across this piece of very desolate country, with little bushes growing but no grass, not good for pasture nor for anything but one purpose which I didn't then suspect. Soon I found myself walking along a ditch which kept cutting me off from the hill, a ditch in the driest of sandy land and as deep as my chin, all shored up with cut poles, or sometimes with plank, or with bundles of twigs, or with willow basket work. And then I saw it was a trench! The Plattsburgers must have made it. It ran all about, experimentally. It had here a shelter of sandbags, there a dugout, there a kitchen. It was made in different ways to show how to use material, I suppose. Really it was very clever. And then when I came too near it at one place, to study it, the rotten wood gave way with me, and so as not to have to fall I was forced to jump, right down into it. And there I was! When I tried to get up at the half-broken place, I was overwhelmed by a shower of sand. Everywhere else the walls were too high for me to climb out. So I took to walking along it, and it twisted all around, with passages like a maze, but nowhere a place to climb. At one corner I met a horrible great snake, helpless down there too. But it went one way and I went the other, till I came to a little niche with a cover overhead, and a loophole looking along the waste of scrub. Outside a little sign said, "Machine-gun emplacement." And there I stood looking out for a sign of help. Then I heard Captain Kirby's voice, no one could mistake it, and I was relieved till I understood what he was saying. "Less noise, men! You couldn't creep up on a dead tree that way. It would hear you coming." The horrible thing had all his hundred and fifty men there, and in a moment I began to see them, little glimpses of olive-drab pushing through the bushes. I heard his voice again: "By squads from the right!" then corporals' voices, then the rushing of men, then more corporals and more rushing. All the time, from nowhere that I could see, came a continual clicking--the absurd creatures were pretending to fire on the trench where I was standing. I began to get more glimpses of men running stooped and throwing themselves flat, heard the captain's war-horn, and a little further away the lieutenant's voice like a bugle.