Then the champion swearer said, “Boys, I’ve cut it all out: no more
drink—not another drop.”

And they said, “All right, we are with you. We’ll cut it out.”

Then he said, “I’ve cut something else out. No more swearing.”

Eighty-five times out of every hundred that the boys in France use a
swear-word they mean no more than I do when I say, “Great Scott.”

“Do you, boys?” I ask them.

“No, sir,” they invariably reply.

“Well, then, why do you use these swear-words?”

And then I’ve got them and, out of their own mouths, they are condemned. I
tell them it is bad form, and I say, “Cut it out.”

These boys made a solemn compact that night that the first man who swore
should clean all nine guns, and before the week was out my champion was
cleaning nine guns.

But those eight boys didn’t go back on him. They were sporty.

I have seen a little bird’s nest all broken with the wind and torn with
the storm, and two or three little eggs, with a few wet leaves over them,
addled and cold and forsaken, and my little gipsy heart cried over those
poor little motherless things, for I was motherless too. And up in a tree
I have heard a thrush singing the song of a seraph and I have said, as I