“Am I to be always like this?” asked Doolan, staring away above the little man’s head.
“Then I’ll say good-bye to ye, sergeant, for I’ll never see ye again.”
During a camp parade of the buglers recently an Irish corporal was in charge. He was asked by the commanding officer if all the buglers were present: He replied: “No, sorr, wan man absent.”
“Well, then,” said the officer, “go and find him and ask him what he has to say for himself.”
A few minutes later Pat came running back. “Shure, sorr,” he cried, “and weren’t we a pair of duffers not to know it? It wor meself. Bedad, sorr, Oi forgot to call me own name entoirely.”
“You don’t seem to feel so enthusiastic as usual about speech-making.”
“Well,” answered Senator Sorghum, “times have changed and it isn’t so easy for a man in a silk hat and a frock-coat to stand out before a lot of men in khaki uniforms or overalls and assert that he is saving the country all by himself.”
An editor in the Far West dropped into church for the first time in many years. The minister was in the very heart of the sermon. The editor listened for a while, and then rushed to his office.
“What are you fellows doing? How about the news from the seat of war?”
“Why, all this about the Egyptian Army being drowned in the Red Sea. The minister up at the church knows all about it, and you have not a word of it in our latest. Bustle round, you fellows, and get out an extra-special edition.”
One industrious war-gardener is pictured as working busily and reflecting on the virtue of raising his own food-supply.
“If everybody grew his own vegetables and ate less meat,” he soliloquized, “we’d put old Bill on the bum in a hurry. This is tough work, but I’ll stick to it if it kills me. I’m with Hoover on this.”
At this point a fine assortment of earthworms was unearthed. The digger’s reflections immediately shifted to a shady stream and the final scene shows him happily fishing.
“Oh, well,” he reflects to soothe his conscience, “vegetables or fish; it’s all the same to Mr. Hoover.”
“Now,” said the Colonel, looking along the line of recruits, “I want a good smart bugler.”
At that out stepped a dilapidated fellow who had a thick stubble of black beard.
“What!” said the colonel, eying him up and down. “Are you a bugler?”