"I can't quite follow all those business plans," said Sam. "My head isn't trained to it; but I'm glad we're going to do good there, and if I can do something great to bring it about, it will give me real happiness."
"It will, old man, it will. I'm sure of it," cried Cleary, as he took his leave of Sam in front of the hotel. "Let me know what steamer you're going by as soon as you get orders, and I'll try to manage it to get a passage on her too. They often carry newspaper men on our transports."
On the following day Sam went to visit his uncle at Slowburgh, a small sea-port of some four thousand inhabitants lying several miles away from the railroad. The journey in the train occupied six hours or more, and Sam spent the time in learning the Castalian language in a handbook he had bought in town. He had already taken lessons in the language at East Point and was beginning to be fairly proficient. He alighted at the nearest station to Slowburgh and entered the rather shabby omnibus which was standing waiting. Sam felt lonely. There was nothing military about the station and no uniform in sight. He no longer wore a uniform himself, and the landscape was painfully civilian. Finally the horses started and the 'bus moved slowly up the road. Sam was impatient. His fellow countrymen were risking their lives thousands of miles away, and here he was, creeping along a country road in the disguise of a private citizen, far away from the post of duty and danger. He looked with disgust at the plowmen in the fields busily engaged in preparing the soil for next year's grain.
"What a mean, poor-spirited lot," he thought. "Here they are, following their wretched plows without a thought of the brave soldiers who are defending their country and themselves so many leagues away. It is the soldier, suffering from hunger and fever and falling on the battlefield in the agony of death, who makes it possible for these fellows to spend their days in pleasant exercise in the fields. The soldier bears civilization on his back, he supports all the rest, he is the pedestal which bears without complaint the civilian as an idle ornament. The soldier, in short, is the real man, the only perfect product of creation."