“Please read it over once more,” he said when the dominie had finished the chapter and started to close the Good Book.
Touched by this further sign of penitence, the minister read it again.
“Tell me, poor man,” he said when he was done, “what was it held you so close the while I was reading—was it the lesson of the Scripture or was it the words?”
“Nay, nay,” said the tippler—“ ’twas your grand breath!”
§ 34 The Treacherous Warehouse
When the Yanks prepared to make their advance through Belleau Wood there was brought up from the south of France, a negro labor battalion, not a man of which until that time had ever heard a big gun crack in anger, but who, before this, had been employed in building roads and mending bridges and unloading freight cars. This outfit was set to work constructing defences of fallen timbers in the lower fringe of the forest, on the contingency that our troops, after their first onslaught might be driven back and need shelter behind which to fight on the retreat.
On a morning when the enemy, for reasons best known to themselves, were feeling unusually peevish and fretful, one of the correspondents, picking his cautious way through the thickets, came upon a coal black woodchopper in a ragged khaki shirt, who was swinging his ax on a fallen tree and between strokes looking up to where German shells were whistling through the ragged foliage overhead and occasionally exploding in his vicinity with a large, harsh, grating, unpleasant sound.
At each fresh report the darky would say—and even a perfect stranger to him could tell that from the very bottom of his soul he meant it—
“Oh, Lawsy, how I does wish’t I wuz home!”
“Well,” asked the correspondent, “why did you enlist if you didn’t care to face some danger?”