t day when it
seemed to Eddie that every one in town had had everything from birch beer
to peach ice cream. On his way home to supper he stopped at the
postoffice with a handful of letters that old man Kunz had given him to
mail. His mother had told him that they would have corn out of their own
garden for supper that night, and Eddie was in something of a hurry. He
and his mother were great pals.

In one corner of the dim little postoffice lobby a man was busily tacking
up posters. The whitewashed walls bloomed with them. They were gay,
attractive-looking posters, done in red and blue and green, and after
Eddie had dumped his mail into the slot, and had called out, "Hello,
Jake!" to the stamp clerk, whose back was turned to the window, he
strolled idly over to where the man was putting the finishing touches to
his work. The man was dressed in a sailor suit of blue, with a
picturesque silk scarf knotted at his hairy chest. He went right on
tacking posters.

They certainly were attractive pictures. Some showed groups of stalwart,
immaculately clad young gods lolling indolently on tropical shores, with
a splendor of palms overhead, and a sparkling blue sea in the distance.
Others depicted a group of white-clad men wading knee-deep in the surf as
they laughingly landed a cutter on the sandy beach. There was a
particularly fascinating one showing two barefooted young chaps on a
wave-swept raft engaged in that delightfully perilous task known as
signaling. Another showed the keen-eyed gunners busy about the big guns.

Eddie studied them all.

The man finished his task and looked up, quite casually.

"Hello, kid," he said.

"Hello," answered Eddie. Then--"That's some picture gallery you're
giving us."

The man in the sailor suit fell back a pace or two and surveyed his work
with a critical but satisfied eye.

"Pitchers," he said, "don't do it justice. We've opened a recruiting
office here. Looking for young men with brains, and muscle, and
ambition. It's a great chance. We don't get to these here little towns
much."

He placed a handbill in Eddie's hand. Eddie glanced down at it
sheepishly.

"I've heard," he said, "that it's a hard life."

The man in the sailor suit threw back his head and laughed, displaying a
great deal of hairy throat and chest. "Hard!" he jeered, and slapped one
of the gay-colored posters with the back of his hand. "You see that!
Well, it ain't a bit exaggerated. Not a b