"You will never regret being thoughtful when it comes to giving your mother a little line or two of written happiness. But in your letters I have noticed an absence of complaints. Is it because you have none to make or that you didn’t want us to feel bad by recounting them?" "I haven’t a single kick coming, Dad, for we are treated splendidly. Good food and well cooked, good clothes, fine beds and healthy work. I only wish it was more strenuous than it is. I spend a lot of time in the gym and playing ball. I did hope we musics would get more military drill than we do, but outside of a little marching and physical drills and a ’hike’ across the river into Maryland, we do nothing of real soldiering. One of the privates has taught me the manual of arms and bayonet exercises, so I’m not wasting my opportunities. I think that in a year more I can get my rank changed to a private, then I shall be in line for promotion to corporal." "Time enough, my boy. It is better to make haste slowly and thoroughly, for I don’t doubt you will have to be very thorough if you are to succeed. Have you any idea what books you will require?" "Well, I’m studying the U.S. Army Guard Manual, which the marines have adopted, and there is a book called ’Landing Force and Small Arms Instruction’ for the Navy which is just filled with meat and will take some time to digest. I shall have no difficulty in getting the books as I need them, and my high school education was along the lines that would have helped me most at Annapolis--physics, chemistry, astronomy, surveying and so forth. All these are sure to be valuable, to say nothing of the mathematics up to trig." "It pleases me to hear you like the life," said Dick’s father. "That is more than half the battle always,--the interest and liking we have for the task at hand. No man ever became successful without being in perfect harmony with his work and his environments, no matter what his walk in life." Richard’s mother was more solicitous regarding her son’s creature comforts, and the following day she insisted on making a visit to the barracks and seeing with her own eyes exactly how and where her boy lived. The manner of her request so enchanted Colonel Waverly when she asked to be taken around the post that he volunteered to act as her escort, nor was her New England sense of cleanliness and order once outraged with what she saw.