"I always hated to look for words. I wish you'd tell some of the town boys to write to me. Letters go pretty good in camp and some fellows get a lot. I don't get many. It's hard to answer them if you get many, though, so I don't know which is worst. This is the longest one I ever wrote in my life. I forgot to tell you to tell Aunt Judy I met a fellow from Washington and he said the twins were in jail, but they were let out to work on some Government intrenchments near by. I don't know what they were in for. The fellow didn't know about our other niggers. Said he thought Mark and Phillis were dead because he used to see them but hadn't for a long time. Said Sallie worked for his mother sometimes and that is how he knew so much about them. Two or three of the boys got shot last night putting cartridges in the fire to monkey with the other fellows. None of'em hit yours truly. My hand is plum woah out, as Aunt Judy would say, holding this pen--and the thing has gone to walking on one leg. I guess I broke the point off the other side jabbing at a fly. Good-bye. Write soon,
"P.S.--I forgot to say I am well, and send love. I wish I had some home grub.
"Foxy Leathers got a bully box last week. He gave me nearly half of his fruit cake. The other boys didn't know he had one. They got doughnuts--but even doughnuts are a lot better than the grub we get. H."
The box of "home grub," was speedily packed and sent, and while it lasted it made merry the hearts of his mess. Howard said in one of his letters that he was growing very tall. He said that the boys declared that "if it had not been for his collar he would have been split all the way up, as he had run chiefly to legs." Howard, however, expressed it as his own unbiased opinion that it was jealousy of his ability to walk over the fences that they had to climb which prompted the remark. "Foxy has to climb for it and I put one leg over and then I put the other over--and there you are," he said. Camp life agreed with him, and the restraints of home no longer rasping his temper, he seemed to be the gayest of the gay. Nothing troubled him. He slept and ate wherever and whenever and whatever fell to his lot; lived each day as it came and gave no thought to its successor. He counted up on his fingers when he wrote home last, and tried to remember to write about once a week, because his mother begged that he would, and not at all because the impulse to do so urged him or because he cared especially to say anything. He liked to get letters, but he knew he was sure of those from home whether he wrote or not, and so his replies had that uncertainty of date dependent upon luck. No sense of responsibility weighed upon him, and his mother's anxiety impressed him--when he thought of it at all--as a bit of womanish nonsense; natural enough for a woman, but all very absurd. He had no deeper mental grasp upon it, and indeed the whole ethical nature of this boy seemed embryonic; and so it was that his camp life was the happiest he had ever known--the happiest he would ever know.