made you feel provincial and
ashamed. It made you ashamed of not knowing the sort of thing you used
to be ashamed of knowing.

Visiting day was the worst. They grew savage, somehow, watching the
mothers and sisters and cousins and sweethearts go streaming by to the
various barracks. One of the boys to whom Tyler had never even spoken
suddenly took a picture out of his blouse pocket and showed it to Tyler.
It was a cheap little picture--one of the kind they sell two for a
quarter if one sitter; two for thirty-five if two. This was a twosome.
The boy, and a girl. A healthy, wide-awake wholesome looking small-town
girl, who has gone through high school and cuts out her own shirtwaists.

"She's vice-president of the Silver Star Pleasure Club back home," the
boy confided to Tyler. "I'm president. We meet every other Saturday."

Tyler looked at the picture seriously and approvingly. Suddenly he
wished that he had, tucked away in his blouse, a picture of a
clear-eyed, round-cheeked vice-president of a pleasure club. He took out
his mother's picture and showed it.

"Oh, yeh," said the boy, disinterestedly.

The dragging weeks came to an end. The night of Tyler's restlessness was
the last night of quarantine. To-morrow morning they would be free. At
the end of the week they were to be given shore leave. Tyler had made up
his mind to go to Chicago. He had never been there.

Five thirty. Reveille.

Tyler awoke with the feeling that something was going to happen.
Something pleasant. Then he remembered, and smiled. Dabney Courtney, in
the next hammock, was leaning far over the side of his perilous perch
and delivering himself of his morning speech. Tyler did not quite
understand this young southern elegant. Monicker had two moods, both of
which puzzled Tyler. When he awoke feeling gay he would lean over the
extreme edge of his hammock and drawl, with an affected English accent:

"If this is Venice, where are the canals?"

In his less cheerful moments he would groan, heavily, "There ain't no
Gawd!"

This last had been his morning observation during their many weeks of
durance vile. But this morning he was, for the first time in many days,
enquiring about Venetian waterways.

Tyler had no pal. His years of companionship with his mother had bred in
him a sort of shyness, a diffidence. He heard the other boys making
plans for shore leave. They all scorned Waukegan, which was the first
sizable town beyond the Station. Chica