Dear young Kitty:
Why is it that things which ought to make you feel right at home just make you homesick? Here T'vq been hobnobbing with gobs from all over the U.S.A. this last week, but instead of feeling as if Shanghai was only an annex of the States Um desperately lonesome.
OF course to a Middle-Westerner these flapping-trousered, whitecapped blue-jackets are novel, yatiier romantic items in the landscape and to a recently exiled Towan the call to entertain folks from home" sounds clear and strong. Consequently I've been enjoying: myself and I trust not overly boring our defenders of the seas by playing round with them at the Navy Y festivities.
Tovon oF Basesany.
Of course the first question you hurl at the defenceless sailor is:
"Where are you from?' and no matter where he says you try to find some mutual acquaintances. Its hard on a person who seldom stopped outside her native state, but I find we can always get together on Babe Ruth if all else fails. It was a sad blow to my civic pride to find some Iowans in uniform who had never heard of Iowa Centre. Really I felt so cut up about it that afterwards I didn't want to wound any of them by not knowing their home towns, and got into frightful geographical difficulties by not wishing to expose my ignorance.
Another thing they expect to be asked is 'How do you like Shanghai?' And really the answers you get furnish you with a ten course dinner for thought. On the whole they like Shanghai because there's more doing here and more white faces than they see in their stations up river or down in, the Philippines.. They all claim to have use for foreign parts and to be sighing for "'God's Country," but you can't help noticing the number of _re-enlistments.
They are a pretty contented bunch, too, tell any inquiring re-Jatives back home. Some of them grouse, hut most of them are proud of their ships and commanders and "'wouldn't swap them, neither." And they are all eager to tell you, if you talk about the men their ships commemorate, that some of them "were ramed for sailors, too.""
They all seem like young boys but they look at life with a practic. ally and talk about it with a directness which is refreshing, if startling. They work, they play, they drink (some of them), and they fight (most of them), they spend their last cent or give it away with equal readiness, but they have no time for pettinesses and I didn't hear one of them question as to whether "it was being
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