I have found an old friend in Camp in the person of Mike Donaldson of Company I. Mike was an altar boy of mine in Haverstraw not long after I was ordained. We both left there, I to teach metaphysics and Mike for a career in the prize-ring, in which he became much more widely and favorably known to his fellow citizens than I can ever hope to be. One of his titles to fame is that he was sparring partner to Stanley Ketchell. He has brought me a set of battered boxing gloves which he presented to me with a very moving speech as relics of that departed hero. I do not know exactly what he expects me to do with the relics but I rather feel after his speech of presentation that it would be considered appropriate if I suspend them reverently from the rafter of my chapel like the _ex voto_ offerings of ships that one sees in seaport shrines. I have become a marrying Parson. Love and fighting seem to go together—they are the two staples of romance. I have had a large number of marriages to perform. In most cases the parties enter my church tent from the rear and are quietly married before the simple altar. We have had a few weddings however on the grand scale. Michael Mulhern of the Band had arranged for a quiet wedding with a very sweet little girl named Peggy O’Brien. This afternoon at four o’clock when I was ready to slip over with the young couple and their witnesses to my canvas church I saw the band forming. “What is this formation for, Michael. You don’t have to be in it, do you?” “Ah, Father,” said Michael, with a blush, “the boys heard somehow what was going to happen and they’re going to serenade us.” We had to parade over to church behind the band playing a wedding march, with 10,000 soldiers and visitors following curiously in the rear. So Michael and his bride were united in matrimony before a vast throng that cheered them, and showered them with rice that soldiers brought over from the kitchens, many of the lads battling with the groom for the privilege of kissing the bride. _October_ 15th, 1917 We will soon be off to the war and I have been looking over the Regiment, studying its possibilities.