Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III WATER, WATER EVERYWHERE, BUT NOT A SINGLE DRINK TAKE a fountain-pen, not any particular kind of fountain-pen, but just one of these ordinary first-class pens that leaks,— and thus equipped, one will find that in any dry and un- ferrnented city such as Washington is in wartimes the pen can be adapted to new uses which makes it one of the great life-saving engines of modern war. The possibilities of the fountain-pen in these troublous days were demonstrated to me repeatedly during a long forenoon and afternoon in war-crowded Washington while I was awaiting the return of the wife from Baltimore. I arose after a night of more or less sleep in my pet abandoned bar-room in the Fourteenth Street hotel, and learned the astounding news that we could have a room and bath in that same hotel later in the day. An aged retired army officer,it seems, who had lived in the hotel for years and had tried to stick it out even after Washington had gone dry, finally decided to give up the fight against frightful odds. The last of his own little private stock had begun to peter out, and he was in his ninety-first year and rheumatic, and therefore could not journey back and forth on the Washington-Baltimore Liquor Local to procure the stimulants so necessary to one of his years, and he was afraid of the Washington drinking water. In recent days his thoughts had turned often and oftener to the old homestead, which was in some place out on the rolling prairies within sight and sound of the quaint old church spires and distilleries of his native Peoria; and so at last he had decided to call an ambulance to the hotel door and start back to Illinois to grow to an old age of full, mellow beauty. The room clerk had told me these details early, so that I might have first grab at the vaca...