“‘Of all sad words of tongue or pen,
The saddest are these, we’re ”soaked“ again.’
“However that may be, here I am sitting in a shed, with a sheepskin over my shoulders, looking like a lady—but not smelling like one. Fritz is acting rather nasty, sending us his R. S. V. P.’s by the air-line, and we reply P. D. Q., and the ‘wake’ is a howling success as the big bulls and the little terriers ‘barcarole.’ And speaking of wakes, I was awake myself the other night in my hut and the Gothas were whirring overhead and Fritz pulling the string every now and then. It was pitch-dark and a big Bertha had just shaken all creation, when I overheard two ‘blimeys’ fanning buckwheat while they hunted a shell-hole.
“‘Where are yer, Bill?’ asked one.
“I’m ’ere,’ says Bill.
“‘Where’s ’ere?’ says his pal.
“‘Ow the blinkin’ ’ell do I know where ’ere is?’ says Bill.
“Just then Fritz put one alongside of my hut and snuffed out all the candles, but thanks to the good old soft mud—and how we have cussed that mud!—I am writing to you, Old Top, tonight. I expect to be on the hike again in a day or so, I know not where and I do not care. All places look alike to this old kid. They can set me down in a field of mud and inside of forty-eight hours I have got a home fit for a prince, or a ground-hog—sometimes I am living several feet under ground and other times I am living in a tent, a hut, a stable, barn, shed, and, when in luck, in some deserted chateau.”
Jarvis, lying on his back looking up at a twinkling star through a hole in the roof seems to have started a train of verse in his brain, for he writes: