little of it while I am eating and to eat a good deal while I am
drinking it; both of which, I may state, I am now doing to the best of
my ability, and without let or hindrance, Herb.'"

To be exactly correct about it, I began mapping out this campaign long
before I took ship for the homeward hike. The suggestion formed in my
mind during those weeks I spent in London, when the resident
population first went on the food-card system. You had to have a meat
card, I think, to buy raw meat in a butcher shop, and you had to have
another kind of meat card, I know, to get cooked meat in a
restaurant; and you had to have a friend who was a smuggler or a
hoarder to get an adequate supply of sugar under any circumstances.
Before I left, every one was carrying round a sheaf of cards. You
didn't dare go fishing if you had mislaid your worm card.

The resolution having formed, it budded and grew in my mind when I was
up near the Front gallantly exposing myself to the sort of
table-d'hôte dinners that were available then in some of the lesser
towns immediately behind the firing lines; and it kept right on
growing, so that by the time I was ready to sail it was full sized. En
route, I thought up an interchangeable answer for two of the oldest
conundrums of my childhood, one of them being: "Round as a biscuit,
busy as a bee; busiest thing you ever did see," and the other, "Opens
like a barn door, shuts like a trap; guess all day and you can't guess
that." In the original versions the answer to the first was "A watch,"
and to the second, "A corset"--if I recall aright But the joint
answer I worked out was as follows: "My face!"

Such was the pleasing program I figured out on shipboard. But, as is
so frequently the case with the most pleasing things in life, I found