"NOW YOU SEE IT, NOW YOU DON'T" The big transport _Texas Pioneer_ came slowly about in obedience to her straining ropes and rubbed her mammoth side against the long wharf.

Up and down, this way and that, slanting-wise and curved, drab and gray and white and red, the grotesque design upon her towering freeboard shone like a distorted rainbow in the sunlight.

Out of the night she had come, stealing silently through the haunts where murder lurks, and the same dancing rays which had run ahead of the dispatch-rider and turned to mock him, had gilded her mighty prow as if to say, "Behold, I have reached you first." At her rail crowded hundreds of boys in khaki, demanding in English and atrocious French to know where they were.
"Are we in France ?" one called.
"Where's the Boiderberlong, anyway ?" another shouted, the famous Parisian boulevard evidently being his only means of identifying France.
"Is that Napoleon's tomb ?" another demanded, pointing to a little round building.
"Look at the pile of hams," shouted another gazing over the rail at a stack of that delectable.

"Maybe we're in _Hamburg_!" "This is Dippy," his neighbor corrected him.
"You mean Deppy," another said.
And so on and so on.

There seemed to be hundreds of them, thousands of them, and all on a gigantic picnic.
"Which is the quickest way to Berlin ?" one called, addressing the throng impartially.
"Second turn to your left." Some of these boys would settle down in France and make it their long, final home, under little wooden crosses.