Serious as was the work, recruits, with the spirit of eternal youth, enlivened it by fun, humor and pranks. This was always in evidence. No hardship could dispel it. A story is told of a young Texan, just enlisted and being inspected at Great Lakes. All the recruits were ordered to fall in line and strip for inspection. Sans shoes, sans shirts, sans pants, in fact sans everything in the way of clothing, the boy marched past the doctor. The Texan, with utter lack of the awe which a gold-striped surgeon is supposed to inspire, had secured a paper stencil, used to mark clothing, and using black paint had lettered his bare stomach with the words, "Good morning, doctor." The grave surgeon saw the joke was on him, and led the hearty laughter at this original greeting. Another recruit from a Western state, hearing of the various detentions and occasional surgical operations supposed to precede acceptance, hung over the place where he supposed his appendix was located this placard: "I have had my appendix removed." He probably thinks to this day that this saved him from an operation. "I never knew what patriotism meant before I learned it by service in the Navy." That remark was addressed to me by an upstanding, clear-headed youth in naval uniform as the mine-sweepers were welcomed back to New York after they had finished the worst job assigned to the navy, that of sweeping up the mines in the drab days after the armistice. He was bronzed by the wind and the sun of the North Sea. His muscles seemed made of steel. Exposure had given a vigor of body that made you feel that he could do anything. "Tomorrow," he went on, "I am going back to my job in civil life, but I am a different man. Before the war I think I loved my country and I suppose the flag meant something to me. But I felt no passion of patriotism. It was a matter of course. But the Navy has taught me such reverence for the flag that I have a thrill every time it is raised, and somehow my country became something more than land and water and houses. It seems something holy to me. And that's what my naval service did for me," he added as he passed to his place at the banquet table. Such inculcation of love of country was the best by-product of the war. How was it that the regulars in the Navy were able to train so rapidly the recruits that poured in after war was declared? How did they attain the efficiency which led to the promotion of ten thousand of them to warrant or commissioned officers?