No I didn’t draw a pass. I’ve been around camp the whole bloomin’ day, but there were about fifteen thousand lucky fellows who did draw passes. I saw them going down in groups for every train to the city since four o’clock yesterday afternoon. But Fat and I seem to be a bit unlucky. Poor Fat, he has wanted a pass to get home and see his mother ever since he has been here. But a pass wouldn’t do him much good. He hasn’t any uniform yet. Still waiting for the army tailors to get busy. I wouldn’t be surprised if they shipped him to France with no more Government property than a khaki shirt. We’ve been consoling each other most of the day. Fat’s a good chap and a mighty likeable fellow.

It has been a day of rest, however, for all except Giuseppi, the company’s barber. He has done a tremendous business; shaved every one, from the Captain down.

Giuseppi’s methods are unique and interesting. Somewhere he found two planks, which he brought into the dormitory, and, by catching the lower ends under the iron work of one cot and propping them against the side of another, he contrived an affair that resembles remotely a steamer chair. Line forms to the right. Bring your own brush and shaving stick and do your own lathering for a quick and effective shave.

I can’t guess how many he shaved. The line stretched the length of the dormitory from breakfast to dinner time. The men dabbed their brush into a single basin of cold water and moistened their faces while standing in line. Then as they moved on they soaped and lathered their own faces and rubbed it in thoroughly. And by the time they reached the plank their bristles needed only a final application of lather and Giuseppi got busy with the razor.

He is a wonder. All he did this morning was strop and shave, strop and shave, and at ten cents a head—no I mean face—(twenty cents a head, only no hair cut on Sunday) I guess he made a fair week’s wages. As each victim left the planks, said victim wiped the remaining lather from his face, ears and nose and applied his own talcum powder.

Perhaps Giuseppi’s business was increased by his announcement: “No shava for tree days now. To-morrow I getta da needle for twice times. No can use my arm vara moch.”

Which reminds me that I am scheduled for my second inoculation to-morrow.

I have been discovering some of the unknown who are in our midst. Unearthed a popular song writer (whose income before he adopted the dollar-a-day job for Uncle Sam was reputed to be $10,000 a year). I didn’t unearth him really. He bobbed up this morning, when several of the fellows were playing mouth organs, and now, behold, he’s organizing a glee club. Then there is a linguist, who is fresh from the biggest financial institution in the world where he handled all their French and Spanish translation work. He has started a class in French which is in session for an hour every evening. We are all Parlez vous-ing with more or less (mostly more) inaccuracies. But what we lack in accent and correct pronunciation we make up for in genuine Parisian gestures. Oh, we’re there all right.

Another of our enterprising members is a well-known landscape gardener, who, in co-operation with one of our several architects, has organized a campaign for a “barracks beautiful,” all of which doesn’t mean very much to most of us, but gives them a good opportunity to dispose of their spare time. Our afternoons have been spent in pulling stumps in the vicinity of the barracks and grading the street and dooryard until now no one would ever recognize it for the same place. But the landscape gardener has carried the work a bit further and with the assistance of several of us, including myself, gone off into the woods and dug up a score or more of pine and cedar saplings about five feet high. These have been transplanted in the form of a hedge around our barracks, on top of a tiny terrace, and they certainly soften the outlines of the unpainted building and add a touch of that which is lacking in the vicinity of most of the structures.

He, the landscaper, has placed whitewashed stones at conspicuous corners, too, and on either side of our tiny porch he has worked out the number of the company and the number of the division in concrete letters, which the camp orderly scrubs industriously every morning to keep them white and presentable. The job of camp orderly, by the way, is the worst job a man can be detailed to here, being one degree lower than kitchen police; and since I know mighty well the rigours of that, I’m going to steer clear of this other form of punishment, if it is humanly possible to do so.

The Sunday crop of visitors flocked to camp as usual to-day and I entertained several who did not come to see me especially, but who brought along such delightful lunch that I felt constrained to show them about and be pleasant to them at least while the lunch lasted.