The next night we went to a musical comedy which had some bright spots marred a little by the leading actor who possessed the supreme courage to imitate a rather more clever person than himself--Billy Sunday. Of course, if Billy Sunday is a knave then the actor chap is doing the right thing to expose him, but quite numbers of people have been made a little better by the Reverend William and the evidence seems to show that he is sincere and just as capable of making men better as of being able to play a jolly good game of base ball. "_Voilá!_"
A few days after this I visited two members of the Reina Club who are married to each other and who live on Long Island with a tiny wee baby. I loved the baby especially. She had a bad cold and her wee nose was all red at the corners and her tiny eyes were watering, but that did not prevent her from being a profound optimist. She looked at me doubtfully for a moment while she wondered if I would respond to the great big smile she threatened to give me. I got the smile all right.
And now I am back in Bethlehem, but my mind refuses to think about guns and gun carriages, but rather persists in soaring sometimes down to Annapolis, sometimes down to Norfolk, often across the ocean to the Irish channel, at all of which places I have warm friends amongst the sailors of Uncle Sam.
I want to tell you about an interesting race of people called "inspectors." If you are merely a footslogger, and know nothing about guns and carriages, I had better give you a slight idea of the things that happen to a simple gun and carriage before it reaches the comparative rest of the battlefield.
Now the word "inspector" at once suggests someone who inspects. I've had to inspect my men in order to prepare myself and them for the visitation of the major, who in turn awaits the colonel. But the inspection of a gun is a very different matter. As a mere person who is responsible for the firing of the thing, and also the unwilling target of the people who desire to destroy the gun and its servants, I was always wont to call the whole thing, including the wheels and all the mechanism, a "gun." But this showed remarkable inaccuracy. The gun is just the tubes of steel, with the top or outside one termed the jacket, that form what a layman would call the barrel, and a properly trained recruit "the piece." All the rest is the carriage. If you are dealing with inspectors be very careful about this. They are generally awfully good at mathematics, and can dictate letters by the yard without winking. They can work out fearful things called curves. I believe this has something to do with strain, and suggests to my unmathematical mind the dreadful thing I had to draw in order to get through my "little go."