eare ... it was very bad
Kiplingesque stuff ... much like my own bad verse of that period....

Once Lang recited by heart the whole of _King Lear_ to me, having me
hold a copy of the play, to prove that he did not fumble a single line
or miss a single word ... which he did not....

Lang was a prodigious drunkard. At Nagasaki I rescued him from the
water-butt. Coming back drunk on rice wine, he had stuck his head down
for a cool drink, as a horse does. And in he had tumbled, head-first. If
I had not seen his legs wiggling futilely in the air, and drawn him
forth, dripping, he would have drowned, as the butt was too solid for
his struggles to dump, and he couldn't make a sound for help.

* * * * *

As we neared San Francisco several of the boys spoke to me of taking up
a purse for my benefit. Soldiers are always generous and
warm-hearted--the best men, individually, in the world.

I said no to them, that they must not take up a collection for me ... I
did not really feel that way, at heart, but I liked better seeming proud
and independent, American and self-reliant....

Later on, at the very dock, I acceded ... but now I was punished for my
hypocrisy. The boys were so eager to be home again, they only threw
together about five dollars for me ... when, if I hadn't been foolish, I
might have had enough to loaf with, say a month, at San Francisco, and
do a lot of reading in the Library, and in books of poetry that I might
have picked up at second-hand book stores....

However, I gathered together, before I went ashore, two suits of khaki
and two army blankets, and a pair of good army shoes that afterwards
seemed never to wear out.

And a young chap named Simmons, who had been sergeant, had joined the
army by running away from home, took me to an obscure hotel as his valet
... he wanted to "put on dog," as the Indians say.

He had parents of wealth, back in Des Moines.

I served him as his valet for the two weeks he stayed at the hotel. He
had been shot through the left foot so that a tendon was severed, and he
had to walk with a cane, with a foot that flopped at every step.

He gave me fifteen dollars for wages. After he had departed I rented a
cheap room for a week.

* * * * *

Standing in front of a store on Kearney Street, one afternoon, dressed
in my suit of soldier's khaki, looking at the display in the window, I
got the cue that shaped my subs