“Whew!” blew Phil Morgan, unpuckering his lips and breaking off the haunting little air he had been whistling. “I wouldn’t believe you knew so much about the flora of this strange land, Frenchy.”
“Oi, oi! Is it Flora he’s bragging about? Then Frenchy’s got a new girl!”
“Sounds to me,” mumbled Al Torrance, who lay along the flower-bestrewed bank with his hat over his eyes, “that he was discussing the fauna of the country—with his snap-dragons, and fox’s gloves, and cows slipping.”
“Ignoramus that you are!” scoffed Michael Donahue, otherwise “Frenchy.” “I am talkin’ to Whistler. He knows something and appreciates the profundity of me learnin’.”
“Ye-as,” drawled Torrance, otherwise “Torry,” as their leader began droning away, his lips puckered again. “He knows just enough to whistle the same awful tune for an hour. What is it, anyway, Phil?”
“The tune the old cow died on, I guess,” suggested Ikey Rosenmeyer.
“It’s a tune Phoebe was playing on the piano a good deal the last time we were home,” said Whistler with some gravity. “Wish I’d hear from the folks again. I am worried about Phoebe.”
He spoke of his eldest sister, who during the last few months had not been well. Although, like many brothers and sisters, Philip Morgan, by his chums usually called Whistler, and Phoebe had their differences, now when far from home, “the folks” seem nearer and dearer than ever in his mind.
Philip Morgan lay with his chums on a bank beside a tiny trickle of water called a brook in that shire, although it was nothing more than a rill. They were high up on “the downs,” overlooking a port in which the American destroyer Colodia lay at anchor amid a multitude of naval vessels of three nations.
Over the sea a thick haze, on land the yellow sunshine, so welcome when it is seen in England that it seems more beautiful than elsewhere. The boys had forty-three hours’ shore leave, and for that brief space of time they desired, as most sailors do, to get just as far away in spirit and in surroundings from the ship as possible.