some flop-eared huzzy with a black and tan reputation.

_Aug. 10th._
All day long and a little longer I have been carrying sacks of flour. The next time I see a stalk of wheat I am going to snarl at it. This new occupation is a sort of special penance for not having my hammock lashed in time. It seems that I have been in the service long enough to know how to do the thing right by now, but the seventh hitch is a sly little devil and always gets me. I need a longer line or a shorter hammock, but the only way out of it that I can see is to get a commission and rate a bed.
[Illustration: "I CARRIED ALL THE FLOUR TO-DAY THAT WAS RAISED LAST YEAR IN THE SOUTHERN SECTION OF THE STATE OF MONTANA"]
I carried all the flour to-day that was raised last year in the southern section of the State of Montana, and I was carrying it well and cheerfully until one of my pet finger nails (the one that the manicure girls in the Biltmore used to rave about) thrust itself through the sack and precipitated its contents upon myself and the floor. A commissary steward when thoroughly aroused is a poisonous member of society. One would have thought that I had sunk the great fleet the way this bird went on about one little sack of flour.

"Here Mr. Hoover works hard night and day all winter," he sobs at me, "and you go spreading it around as if you were Marie Antoinette."

I wondered what new scandal he had about Marie Antoinette, but I held my peace. My horror was so great that the real color of my face made the flour look like a coat of sunburn in comparison.

"There's enough flour there," he continued reproachfully, pointing to the huge mound of stuff in which I stood like a lost explorer on a snow-capped mountain peak and wishing heartily that I was one, "there's enough flour," he continued, "to keep a chief petty officer in pie for twenty-four hours."

"Just about," thought I to myself.

"Well," he cried irritably, "pick it up. Be quick. Pick it up--all of it!""Pick it up," I replied through a cloud of mist, "you can't pick up flour. You can pick up apples and pears and cabbages and cigarette butts for that matter, but you can't pick up flour."

The commissary steward suddenly handed me a piece of paper upon which he had been writing frantically. "Take this to your P.O.," he said shrilly, "and take yourself along with it."

A defect in the sack," I gasped, departing. "And there's a defect in you," he 

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