CHAPTER IV.
First Day in Camp.
Before we can locate ourselves the bugle sounds for mess. Each of the instructors has a certain number of boys in his care, so there is not the slightest confusion.
There is not a roof garden or a palm room or any other make-believe place for eating outdoors in the city that can compare with this. To eat out-of-doors with such air, such views, such food! Those who are hungry pitch right in; those with little appetite begin to eat, gaining a love for the food as they go along. Second helpings of everything are called for and eaten, until at last the waistband protests at such pressure being put upon it.
As soon as the signal is given to leave the table every boy takes quick advantage of it. We see them, running here and there, looking for their bags and boxes. For the next few hours they are as busy as the proverbial bee.
Boys, who, when at home, have not even as much as taken their changes of linen out of the bureau, who since infancy have been washed, combed, brushed and dressed by fond mothers and nurses, here learn for the first time what it is to do for themselves.
It is a joyful revelation to them to find out how much they can do. Heretofore they have not only been willing to let others do for them but have demanded it; now, when they need a bath, there is no one to prepare it for them, so they just go ahead and gather their belongings together and run down to the lake. No shutting of windows and taking a bath in a torrid temperature, with some one handy to rub your back, following that with an alcohol rub. I guess not. You go into water that sparkles, slop around if you cannot swim; swim around if you cannot slop. The water just soaks out all the impurities. Then out you jump. Sometimes you dry with a towel, most of the time the sun dries you, and of all the lovely towels on the face of this earth the pleasant sunshine, woven with gentle breezes, is the one and only towel for me.
In the city a chap just hurries into the water, soaps the washrag, debates, if he is in a hurry, whether to wash from head to foot or just touch the dirty places lightly and depend upon the towel to do the rest. Sometimes he sits down in the tub and doesn't wash at all; just sits there, thinking, like a bump on a log, until he is warned of the flight of time; then jumps out again, not half clean.