Manila. A brief adventure there ... a bum for a few weeks, hanging around soldiers' barracks, blacking shoes for free meals ... till Provost Marshal General Bell, in an effort to clear the islands of boys who were vags and mascots of regiments, gave me and several other rovers and stowaways free transportation back to America.... A brief stop at Nagasaki to have a broken propeller shaft mended: a long Pacific voyage ... then hilly San Francisco one golden morning.... * * * * * All these ocean days I peeled potatoes and helped to dish out rations to the lined-up soldiers at meal-times ... one slice of meat, one or two potatoes, to a tin plate ... For long hours I listened to their lying tales and boasting ... then lied and boasted, myself.... My most unique adventure aboard the _Thomas_; making friends with a four-times-enlisted soldier named Lang, who liked army life because, he said, outside of drills and dress parade, it was lazy and easy ... and it gave him leisure to read and re-read his Shakespeare. He was a Shakespearean scholar.... "It's the best life in the world ... no worries or responsibilities about food and lodging--it spoils a fellow for any other kind of life ... the officers are always decent to a fellow who respects himself as a soldier and citizen." Lang and I became good pals. Day after day I sat listening to him, as, to the accompaniment of the rumble and pulse of the great boat a-move, he quoted and explained Shakespeare to me, nearly always without the book. His talk was fascinating--except when he insisted on repeating to me his own wretched rhymes ... in which he showed he had learned nothing about how to write poetry from his revered Shakespeare ... it was very bad Kiplingesque stuff ... much like my own bad verse of that period.... Once Lang recited by heart the whole of _King Lear_ to me, having me hold a copy of the play, to prove that he did not fumble a single line or miss a single word ... which he did not.... Lang was a prodigious drunkard. At Nagasaki I rescued him from the water-butt. Coming back drunk on rice wine, he had stuck his head down for a cool drink, as a horse does. And in he had tumbled, head-first. If I had not seen his legs wiggling futilely in the air, and drawn him forth, dripping, he would have drowned, as the butt was too solid for his struggles to dump, and he couldn't make a sound for help. * * * * * As we neared San Francisco several of the boys spoke to me of taking up a purse for my benefit. Soldiers are always generous and warm-hearted--the best men, individually, in the world. I said no to them, that they must not take up a collection for me ... I did not really feel that way, at heart, but I liked better seeming proud and independent, American and self-reliant....