hard work of the forenoon---these cadets
had been up, as they we every day in summer, since five in the
morning---spirits ran high at the midday meal, and chaffing talk
and laughter ran from table to table.

The meal over, the battalion marched back to camp. There were
a few minutes yet before the afternoon drills. A few minutes
of leisure? Yes, if such an easy act as dressing in uniform appropriate
to the coming drill, may be termed leisure.

"Drills are going to be called off, I reckon," murmured Greg,
poking his head outside the khaki colored tent after he had put
himself in readiness.

"What's up?" demanded Anstey, lacing a legging.

"The sky is about the color of ink over old Crow's Nest," reported
Greg.

Just then there came a vivid flash of lightning, followed, in
a few seconds, by a deep, echoing roll of thunder. The summer
storms along this part of the Hudson River sometimes come almost
out of the clear sky.

"I'm always thankful for even the smallest favors," muttered Anstey,
with a yawn.

"We'll have to make up this drill some other day, when it's hotter,"
Dick observed, but he nevertheless dropped on to a campstool with
a grunt of relief.

Yes; each of these three cadets could now have a campstool of his
own in quarters, for Prescott, Holmes and Anstey were all yearlings.

And a yearling is "some one" in the cadet corps. For the first few
days after his release from the plebe class the yearling is quite
likely to feel that he is nearly "the whole thing." By degrees,
however, the yearling in summer encampment discovers that there is
a first class of much older cadets above him.

There are no second classmen in summer encampment, until just
before the time to break camp and return to barracks for the following
academic year. Members of the new second class---men who have
successfully passed through the first two years of life at the
United States Military Academy---are allowed two months and a half
of summer furlough, during which time they return to their homes.

Readers of the foregoing volume in this series, _"Dick Prescott's
First Year at West Point"_, are already familiar with the ordeals,
the hard work, the sorrows and the few pleasures, indeed, of plebe
life at West Point.

These readers of the former volume recall just how Dick and Greg
reached West Point in March of the year before; how they passed
their entrance examinations and settled down to fifteen months
of plebedom. S