't rain. They get out there
the minute it's hot enough. The season's so early that they've already
had a night or two up there. If you'd like to go up and pick out a
place, you can. You'll find chalk in the side of the chimney where
there's a brick wanting. You just take the chalk and--but of course
you've done it before."

"Oh, no, I haven't."

"Why, of course you haven't--what am I thinking of? Plenty of room on the
Plains without chalking, I'll be bound. Well, you just chalk out a place
the size of a blanket anywhere on the tin that ain't already marked off,
you know, and that's your property. You and your bed-mate take turnabout
carrying up the blanket and pillows and fetching them down again;
or one carries them up and the other fetches them down, you fix it the
way you like, you know. You'll like the boys, they're everlasting
sociable--except the printer. He's the one that sleeps in that single
bed--the strangest creature; why, I don't believe you could get that man
to sleep with another man, not if the house was afire. Mind you, I'm not
just talking, I know. The boys tried him, to see. They took his bed out
one night, and so when he got home about three in the morning--he was on
a morning paper then, but he's on an evening one now--there wasn't any
place for him but with the iron-moulder; and if you'll believe me, he
just set up the rest of the night--he did, honest. They say he's
cracked, but it ain't so, he's English--they're awful particular.
You won't mind my saying that. You--you're English?"

"Yes."

"I thought so. I could tell it by the way you mispronounce the words
that's got a's in them, you know; such as saying loff when you mean laff
--but you'll get over that. He's a right down good fellow, and a little
sociable with the photographer's boy and the caulker and the blacksmith
that work in the navy yard, but not so much with the others. The fact
is, though it's private, and the others don't know it, he's a kind of an
aristocrat, his father being a doctor, and you know what style that is--
in England, I mean, because in this country a doctor ain't so very much,
even if he's that. But over there of course it's different. So this
chap had a falling out with his father, and was pretty high strung, and
just cut for this country, and the first he knew he had to get to work or
starve. Well, he'd been to college, you see, and so he judged he was all
right--did you say anything?"

"No-