I found the cigar store. I found other stores, too, just shacks thrown together, but carrying a stock of everything in the line of wearing apparel and eatables. One displayed the sign of “Jack’s Unsurpassable Lunch,” another “The Elite,” and another “The Emporium.” There were hundreds of squalid booth-like structures besides, where a host of curious things were for sale to the hordes of big-fisted, deep-chested men who were brought there to build the cantonment. But they tell me that the civilian camp is fast breaking up now, for the cantonment is almost completed. The remount stables for the artillery, the refrigerating plant and the huge bakery are all that remain to be built and the labourers are leaving in big groups. The temporary bakery (I passed it to-night on my way back to camp) is represented by a double line of tents, before each of which is a big field baking oven, its coal fire glowing from lower doors like huge, red eyes and its gaunt smoke-stack reaching upward to terminate in a cloud of black smoke which ascends higher and higher in long, graceful spirals until it is lost in the darkness of the night. Before these ovens work the bakers, in khaki, of course, but each swathed in a flowing white apron. With sleeves rolled up and shirts opened at the throat, they wield their long bakers’ paddles, and as they pass to and fro in the dull red firelight, they look elfish and grotesque; exactly like a lot of gnome bakers off in the “nowheres” baking bread for some ferocious ogre who bids them work incessantly. And these loaves they bake are indeed loaves for ogres; huge affairs two feet long and as big ’round their rich brown girth as pumpkins. In “sheets” of a dozen each they are brought from the fire and placed steaming hot on a nearby table where an expert breaks them apart and tests the tenderness of their fibre and searches for signs of doughiness. These bakers are all of the Regular Army now, but not long since czars of dingy cellar bakeries located anywhere from Boston to San Francisco. But the ogre has called them together and here like gnomes they work, eight hours each in three shifts and the oven fires are kept burning always. Still we drill, drill, drill. This morning was spent in manœuvring and tramping over the wet and soggy countryside in company formation, and this afternoon, by way of variety, we were given a few hours fatigue duty in the line of uprooting more stumps and gnarled tentacles, that seem to have rooted themselves in China. But our hands are hard and leathery now and our muscles no longer creak and pain under the stress. I’ve added four pounds to my former weight and I have never felt more fit in my life. [Illustration: They seemed to have rooted themselves in China] Tuesday: