Dart begins with “Had a lovely dream about you last night. …Just what I’ve been daydreaming all these months. Made me wish the night never would end. But it did – with a cruel whistle to break up our happiness.”

He’s disappointed there’s another Peterson in his world now. He’s an instructor in one of Dart’s classes; petty officer, a fire-control man, second class. He teaches about “those amazing little fellows, the electrons.” Dart says those are the actual words used by the instructor, but “He’s a swell guy, even if he is a bit strange in his linguistic habits.” Folks are frustrated with so many Petersons around. When someone calls “Hey, Pete!” invariably, the wrong two answer.

For the hand tools class, the instructor is a 40-year veteran of “this man’s Navy,” a Chief Engineer. Dart lists his only other accomplishments thusly: ability to smoke an entire cigarette without losing a speck of ash, and the ability to talk endlessly about anything but the subject at hand. He keeps the class waiting until five minutes before their 10-minute break. Then he dismisses them for break and returns about 10 minutes after the next class period has begun. Meanwhile, the class is sitting around trying to read, sleep, sing or write letters. Dart is not so favorably impressed with this guy.

His next paragraph picks up sometime later with the comment “At peace with the world again.” Apparently, he received a nice long airmail letter from Dottie this evening and he’s feeling good.  “My girl still loves me; my recognition test today, 92; I still have plenty of money and we get paid Tuesday. Oh joy, oh rapture!”

What he calls “the black cloud of washing” hovers over him. There’s not much time between chow and darkness these days, especially since his swimming lessons delay everyone’s dinner hour.

He’s making progress in the pool. Today, he crossed the width of the pool using the elementary backstroke without getting a face full of water. He’s slowly regaining the endurance that months of hospitalization stole from him.

Later: Laundry is done and he’s had his evening Coke and orange, so he’s ready to write some more. He draws six little sketches of various devices he must know before his next test. Three are some kind of electrical thingies and the others are common hand tools. To demonstrate, he draws a hammer, labeled with A, B, C,and X, followed by a funny descriptive paragraph. “This is a hammer. It is used for driving nails and generally knocking the daylights out of things. It is a ball-peen hammer, with a ball-shaped hunk of stuff at C, used for putting beautiful dents in things where dents belong, like window glass and varnished furniture. For best results, the thumb should be placed at X between the hammer and the work.”

He’s relieved that, according to Dot, he doesn’t have to worry about the quality of his letters. He thinks that getting “jacked up” about things occasionally helps keep him on the ball. The letter he got from Dot today was well worth all the anxiety he had to go through.

With frustration, he tells Dot there are so many things he wants to write, but he has so little time to write them. This is liberty weekend so he must get a note off to his parents because there won’t be time for much until next week.

He closes by telling her that he loves her very much. He asks that she never change, unless there is some change she could make that would be able to make them both very happy. After a second thought, he says he can’t imagine any change she could make for the better.