Claude turned to the old man in the opposite seat. “When I see those fellows, I feel as if I’d wakened up in the wrong clothes.”
His neighbour looked pleased and smiled. “That the kind of uniform you’re accustomed to?”
“I surely never wore anything else in the month of July,” Claude admitted. “When I find myself riding along in a train, in the middle of harvest, trying to learn French verbs, then I know the world is turned upside down, for a fact!”
The old man pressed a cigar upon him and began to question him. Like the hero of the Odyssey upon his homeward journey, Claude had often to tell what his country was, and who were the parents that begot him. He was constantly interrupted in his perusal of a French phrase-book (made up of sentences chosen for their usefulness to soldiers,—such as; “Non, jamais je ne regarde les femmes”) by the questions of curious strangers. Presently he gathered up his luggage, shook hands with his neighbour, and put on his hat the same old Stetson, with a gold cord and two hard tassels added to its conical severity. “I get off at this station and wait for the freight that goes down to Frankfort; the cotton-tail, we call it.”
The old man wished him a pleasant visit home, and the best of luck in days to come. Every one in the car smiled at him as he stepped down to the platform with his suitcase in one hand and his canvas bag in the other. His old friend, Mrs. Voigt, the German woman, stood out in front of her restaurant, ringing her bell to announce that dinner was ready for travellers. A crowd of young boys stood about her on the sidewalk, laughing and shouting in disagreeable, jeering tones. As Claude approached, one of them snatched the bell from her hand, ran off across the tracks with it, and plunged into a
