There was a young sergeant by the name of Watson. He was a particularly efficient chap. Seats were hard to get on the train going up to Paris, and, when a party of army, navy and marine officers arrived at the little station, we found that Watson had reserved seats for all of us. On our return trip we were surprised to meet him at a station some distance from the little town that he was policing. We asked him if he, too, had been up to Paris. "Yes, sir," he said. We asked him how it happened he was so far away from his post. [Illustration: "Stand by!"--getting ready for Fritz.] "I went up on my own, sir," he told us calmly enough. "I got to thinking that, perhaps, the bluejackets were starting something in Paris, and I thought I'd take a run up just to see they weren't putting anything over on the marine corps." Evidently he found everything O. K. or he would have remained to adjust it. It was Watson who had such trouble making the French peasants clean up their huts. Now, as everyone knows, the French peasant is an individual who wishes to be left alone to tend his little patch of ground. It is his own business if he has the cow beneath the same roof that covers him, and if the chickens have the freedom of the house it is, after all, an affair between himself and his poultry, so to speak. But not in Watson's eyes. He had orders to clean up that town, and there were no exceptions. Protests were in vain. He saw that sanitary conditions for the first time prevailed, and not until the houses fairly shone, and the streets resembled Spotless Town, did he relax and express himself. "I see their point of view, of course, sir," he told me, "but if it happens to be the wrong point of view there's nothing to do but to right it." The marines aren't beaten often at any sport, but when they are they take it as a tragedy. A ship's crew had been trained to shoot. They knew they could shoot, and, on landing, they challenged the marines to a contest. The marines, under a grizzled old sergeant, long in the service, were immensely proud of their skill on the range. They accepted the challenge. They were dead sure of the outcome. There wasn't a nickel within hailing distance that wasn't wagered! The marines got on the range before the bluejackets. No advantage was taken. Well, the bluejackets beat them at slow fire. They beat them at rapid fire. They beat them on skirmish, which the marines had boasted most about. Altogether, it was an unhappy day for the marines. Next day the commander of the ship, rising very early, saw a sight which fascinated him beyond words. On the range were the crack shots of the Marine Corps. Glowering above them stood the sergeant, his beard fairly bristling with anger, his back ram-rod straight. He had the men all out, and he was teaching them, with a thoroughness incomparable, the rudiments of rifle practice.