gs Plunkett or
mebbe B. Plunkett, Esquire; and the cards would be from his old pals in
the trenches, many of whom had worse names, even, than Shelley had made
for himself.

Also the sick warrior turned down flat the arrowroot gruel and Irish-moss
custard and wine jelly and pale broth. He had to have the same coarse
food that is et by common working people who have had no home advantages,
including meat, which is an animal poison and corrupts the finer
instincts of man by reducing him to the level of the brutes. So Arline
Plunkett says. Shelley had it, though, ordering it in a bass voice that
made the statuary teeter. Steak was cooked in the Plunkett home for
the first time since it had been erected, notwithstanding the horrible
example it set to little Keats, who still had golden curls as lovely as
Shelley's once had been and was fed on fruits and nuts.

Arline couldn't of had any pleasant time with her wandering boy them
three weeks he was there. She suffered intensely over the ignominy of
this mail that came to him by the awful name of Bugs, with the gossips
in the post office telling it everywhere, so that the boys round the
cigar store got to calling him Bugs right out plain. And her son seeming
proud of this degradation!

And she couldn't get him to protect himself from drafts by night.
He'd insist on having a window wide open, and when she'd sneak back to
close it so he wouldn't catch his death of cold he'd get up and court
destruction by hoisting it again. And once when she'd crept in and shut
it a second time he threw two shoes through the upper and lower parts so
it would always be open. He claimed he done this in his sleep, having got
into the habit in the trenches when he'd come in from a long march and
someone would close all the windows. But Arline said that this only
showed that war had made him a rowdy, even in his sleep--and out of the
gentlest-mannered boy that ever wore velvet garments and had a cinch on
every prize in the Sunday school; though she did not use coarse words
like that. She told me herself it was time we got this other side of what
war did to gently nurtured youths that had never soiled their lips with
an oath in their lives until they went into war's hell. She said just
that!

Also Shelley had contracted the vicious habit of smoking, which was all
a body would want to know about war. She said he'd have his breakfast in
bed, including whole slices of ham, which comes from the most loa