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 easier to concentrate on this really important missive.

"My fellow-passengers are very trying," he wrote. "They walk seven times around the deck each morning and announce each lap in loud flat voices to their recumbent friends, and accompany the information with bright looks, as though they had said something witty. The fact that they aren't sick is nothing to brag about: better men than they have been—though I'm feeling less green now, thanks.

"It's Sunday morning, and far away over my left shoulder I can hear holy strains. Why do voices sound so high and bitter when singing hymns? A deck steward came and got a dollar off'n me to swell the collection for widows and orphans, but when he'd gone with it, it seemed to me that the inveterate hymn-singers themselves were orphans and that Church was a sort of foundling home for the essentially heavenly-fatherless. If you enjoy perpetual converse with God, why get all dressed up on Sundays and make formal calls on him! As a matter of fact the Church isn't half so much God's house as it is God's tomb."

God's Tomb sounded like a title, and Grover gazed at the sea, listening with an indulgent smile to the accusation of sententiousness with which Geoffrey would greet that last sentence. But everybody is sententious when they're just barely twenty-three, Grover was thinking: give me time.

"I believe I'm in a state of mental and moral convalescence," he continued. "June was a month of