August 31 Thursday – Sam replied from Elmira to the Aug. 25 from his childhood friend and fellow pilot, Will Bowen. Sam had just read a letter of sentiment tinged with self-pity from his old friend, and let Will have it with a “humble 15-cent dose of salts,” comparing Will’s pie-in-the-sky dreams with those of his brother Orion’s:

It is the strangest, the most incomprehensible thing to me, that you are still 16, while I have aged to 41. What is the secret of your eternal youth? —not that I want to try it; far from it—I only ask out of curiosity. I can see by your manner of speech, that for more than twenty years you have stood dead still in the midst of the dreaminess, the melancholy, the romance, the heroics, of sweet but sappy sixteen. Man, do you know that this is simply mental & moral masturbation? It belongs eminently to the period usually devoted to physical masturbation, & should be left there & outgrown [MTLE 1: 104].