woolen shirt.

I threw the shirt away, content to shiver for a few days till we had
steamed to warmer weather ... I scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed
myself.... I had, up to now, had experience with head-lice only ... as a
child, in school....

I look back with a shudder even yet to that experience. During my
subsequent tramp-career I never could grow callous to vermin, as a few
others that I met, did. Once I met a tramp who advised me not to bother
about 'em ... and you would soon get used to 'em ... and not feel them
biting at all ... but most tramps "boil up"--that is, take off their
clothes, a piece at a time, and boil them--whenever they find
opportunity.

* * * * *

Manila. A brief adventure there ... a bum for a few weeks, hanging
around soldiers' barracks, blacking shoes for free meals ... till
Provost Marshal General Bell, in an effort to clear the islands of boys
who were vags and mascots of regiments, gave me and several other rovers
and stowaways free transportation back to America....

A brief stop at Nagasaki to have a broken propeller shaft mended: a long
Pacific voyage ... then hilly San Francisco one golden morning....

* * * * *

All these ocean days I peeled potatoes and helped to dish out rations
to the lined-up soldiers at meal-times ... one slice of meat, one or two
potatoes, to a tin plate ...

For long hours I listened to their lying tales and boasting ... then
lied and boasted, myself....

My most unique adventure aboard the _Thomas_; making friends with a
four-times-enlisted soldier named Lang, who liked army life because, he
said, outside of drills and dress parade, it was lazy and easy ... and
it gave him leisure to read and re-read his Shakespeare. He was a
Shakespearean scholar....

"It's the best life in the world ... no worries or responsibilities
about food and lodging--it spoils a fellow for any other kind of life
... the officers are always decent to a fellow who respects himself as a
soldier and citizen."

Lang and I became good pals. Day after day I sat listening to him, as,
to the accompaniment of the rumble and pulse of the great boat a-move,
he quoted and explained Shakespeare to me, nearly always without the
book.

His talk was fascinating--except when he insisted on repeating to me his
own wretched rhymes ... in which he showed he had learned nothing about
how to write poetry from his revered Shakesp