Consider yourself in luck, my son, to get such an epistle from me. Fact is, I’m Fed Up and I want to know what has become of you and the fellows. A ship from the south is passing to-morrow and I shall send this at a venture. I address it c/o your people, hoping they will see that it reaches you. Shall we write to each other once a month as before? I will try to. Shake, old man! PORT OF K----, MEDITERRANEAN, _October 5, 1914_. DEAR OLD THING, And so you too were taken from your ship, like Blangy! (By the way, I have received nothing from him, not even a card. I suppose his laziness has got the better of him again.) All the same, I wish I might see you on your battleship, in a double-turret, on the lookout for twelve hours out of the twenty-four--How fed up you must be, poor old dear. I remember you telling me in New Orleans how you were soon going to command a Chilian sailing-vessel--“And tack about here and let out the sheets there!” I can still hear you. And now you are a gunner! They must need excellent observers on your battleships and I remember that with the sextant and the table of logarithms you used to beat us all to a frazzle. Position found within half-a-mile in twelve minutes--that was your style! Tut, tut, and so you mayn’t smoke your pipe. Never mind! As a hooker, the battleship Auvergne is right there--the very latest thing! I saw her launched. You ought to have nothing to complain of, and one of these fine days you will drop a few of the best “eggs” on the Austro-Boches at Pola or Cattaro. You won’t miss them, will you, like the Goeben and the Breslau? Taking it all in all, I’ve no sympathy for you. As to the _Pamir_, they let her play bumpety-bump on the bottom for ten days there in Morocco. We rolled from one side to the other, notwithstanding our five thousand bales of cotton. I wouldn’t have believed there could be so much swell on that damned coast. It’s a nice place for loading! Try it! You have to look smart or bang goes your tackle, your derrick, and the whole caboodle, and get your load in your face. The most annoying part of it is that when there isn’t a cloud nor so much as a breath of breeze, you still get rollers and rollers, high as houses, from the sea. Furniture, dishes, books--down comes everything. In dead calms you would think you were in a Malay Straits monsoon.