"So Mo and I held up our glasses and, in indifferent song, proclaimed you what the Army, developing certain rudimentary germs, has made you, and mademoiselle too held up her glass and threw back her head and joined us in the hip, hip, hoorays. It would have done your heart good, laddie, to have been there to see. But we did you proud. "When we emerged from the festival, the prettiest which, in the course of a variegated career, I have ever attended, Mo says: "'If I hadn't a gel at home----' "'If you hadn't got a girl at home,' said I, 'you'd be the next damnedest fool in the army to Phineas McPhail!' "We marched out just before dusk, and there she was by the front door; and though she stood proud and upright, and smiled with her lips and blew us kisses with both hands, to which the boys all responded with a cheer, there were tears streaming down her cheeks--and the tears, laddie, were not for Mo, or me, or any one of us ugly beggars that passed her by. "I also have good news for you, in that I hear from the thunderous, though excellent, Sergeant Ballinghall, there is a probability that when you rejoin, the C.O. will be afflicted with a grievous lapse of memory and that he will be persuaded that you received your wound during the attack on the wiring party. "As I said before, laddie, we're all like the Scots wha' hae wi' Wallace bled and are going to our gory bed or to victory. Possibly both. But I will remain steadfast to my philosophy, and if I am condemned to the said sanguinolent couch, I will do my best to derive from it the utmost enjoyment possible. All kinds of poets and such-like lusty loons have shed their last drop of ink in the effort to describe the pleasures of life--but it will be reserved for the disembodied spirit of Phineas McPhail to write the great Philosophic poem of the world's history, which will be entitled 'The Pleasures of Death.' While you're doing nothing, laddie, you might bestir yourself and find an enlightened publisher who would be willing to give me an ante-mortem advance, in respect of royalties accruing to my ghost. "Mo, to whom I have read the last paragraph, says he always knew that eddication affected the brain. With which incontrovertible proposition and our joint love, I now conclude this epistle. "Yours, PHINEAS."