“I must,” declares the Chief at least six times a day, “go to Toul and get a new uniform.” “Amen,” say I under my breath. Besides the outfits stationed in town there are some twenty more in the neighborhood which draw their rations here at the railhead and then there are the leave trains on their way to or from Germany, whose passing, like a visitation of locusts, leaves the canteen stripped and bare. The negro labor troops in the vicinity supply quite a new element. Sometimes this takes the form of a bit of humour. Last night I had drawn several cups of cocoa ahead of the demand when a darky lad came shyly up to the counter and pointed to one. “Please ma’am,” he asked, “am dat cup occupied?” There is one fat and genial little darky who is a constant customer, always he comes in munching a sandwich or an orange or some other edible bought from a street-vendor. “Eating again, Jo?” asked the Chief today. “Why Boss,” expostulated Jo, “I only eats one meal a day! But dat,” he grinned, “am all de time!” “Shines” the boys invariably call them. Tonight we were amused to see a negro corporal, who, not content with the chevrons on his sleeve, had sewed an additional pair on his overseas cap! Conflans, March 14. My family at the hut consists of the Chief, Harry, Jerry and Slim. Harry and Jerry are as nice lads as one could find anywhere, but Slim is the bird that hatched out of the cuckoo’s egg. Lean, uncouth, according to his own claim, “the tallest man that Uncle Sam’s got in his army,” with an inordinately long neck and an Adam’s apple so prominent as to give him the appearance of an ostrich in the act of swallowing a perpetual orange, “Slim Old Horse” as the boys call him, seems to me at times more like an animated caricature of the middle west “Long Boy” than a being of flesh and blood and bone. How he ever became attached to the Y. is a point on which nobody seems certain, but here he is and here he sticks in spite of every effort to dislodge him. I fancy his “Top Kick” was only too glad to get rid of him and when he discovered Slim’s inclination toward the Y. simply let him go and washed his hands of him. Slim’s health is uncertain. Most of the time he only feels well enough to sit in the office and eat or “chaw.” “I started in ter chaw terbaccer,”—he talks with a nasal twang which is impossible to reproduce,—“when I was a kid four years old; when my daddy an’ my mammy found it out, they sure did start ter raise hell with me, but I says to ’em; ‘All right, have it your way, but then it will be whisky and rum fer mine, when I’m twenty-one!’ So my mammy says ‘Let ’im chaw.’ An’ I’ve chawed ever sence.” “I’ve only got one lung,” he remarked the other day, “and that’s a little one.” “Slim,” I urged, “I’m worried about you. You oughtn’t to be here. You ought to be in the hospital where you could be properly cared for. Go to your medical officer and tell him from me that he must send you to the hospital.”