Trying to use those crayons. I have done one little daub (or rub, or smidge, whichever is the word appropriate to chalk offensives) and am in the middle of a second.
Have lately been and felt gay almost to hilarity – don’t know the cause, other than good health and the approach of spring. I even made a bad pun this morning before dawn while Jock and I were harnessing in semi-darkness – he got quite annoyed.
Great shells, coming from so far back that we could not distinguish the reports of the guns they came from, kept roaring overhead in salvos, sounding like railway trains. There was, to me, the novel sight of many blue, bright and wonderfully swift swallows, swooping and skimming above in every direction. Their wings and backs are a sleep electric blue, the under body from the wing-joints white, their long neatly-forked tails streaming behind. They are the smartest birds I know.
My mules are now a pair of madcaps – the supercilious Rangatira and the “scatty” mule who dances a fandango all the time I’m grooming her – neither of them inclined to make chums either of me or each other.
Have just received from Jock’s hands a ‘dixie’ of tinned fruit and custard – we have also in reserve five or six eggs ready boiled.
[Image: Sketch of “Donks” in crayon by Lincoln Lee, c1918]
Walk March 