Already Mrs. Francis had passed into the room a nightshirt and a three-quart pitcher brimming with sparkling Croton. Without a pause Parent Francis had filled a tumbler and passed it on to his offspring, who eagerly drained the glass. Tumbler after tumbler of water was tumbled into the digestive system of the underweight linotyper, while steadily from the kitchen came the happy sizzling of four pork chops and fast-frying potatoes with trimmings. Twenty-one glasses of water disappeared into young Walter Francis before Saturday’s sun had set, together with all the pork chops, the fried potatoes, thick slices of buttered bread, and some other snacks. The Sunday treatment included fourteen glasses of water and a general packing-in of fattening fodder, until dinner-time arrived, when son Walter was fed up on two pounds of steak smothered in boiled potatoes with trimmings of stewed corn and mashed turnips, all resting on a solid foundation of well-buttered bread and roofed with a generous slab of apple pie. And then: One and one-quarter pounds of mutton-chops merely formed the architectural approaches to the breakfast Walter Francis found staring him in the face when he arose heavily on Monday morning. Ham and eggs in groups—salty ham which hadn’t been parboiled, thus retaining its thirst-arousing properties—was the centerpiece around which the luncheon Mrs. Francis had prepared that day for her son was draped. A dinner that ran all the way from soup to nuts (the time was growing short if Parent Francis was to make good on his promises) followed on Monday night, the big noise of the Monday dinner being a sirloin steak. And just before Son Francis decided to call it a day and waddle to bed Spanish-American War Veteran Francis had a final happy thought. Father fed son a plentiful supply of dried apples and then unleashed a growler and went down to the corner and got a quart of collarless beer. Walter Francis flooded the dried apples with the entire quart of beer, cried “Woof! I’m a hippopotamus!” and collapsed into bed. Tuesday morning last Father and Mother Francis personally helped their son toward the street-door after he had breakfasted on five pork-chops, two cups of coffee and four rolls. Once more he was about to set sail for the Second Naval Battalion recruiting office at the foot of Fifty-second Street, where three days earlier he had been turned down as hopelessly shy on tonnage. Parent Francis helped his bouncing boy aboard the trolley-car, shouting a last word of caution to walk, not run, to the nearest entrance to the recruiting station.