illow-cases opposite to my ward. And then he laughed a
laugh of fiendish glee.

"Do you know," he said, "that instead of having three pillow-cases too
few, you've seven too many!"

Such are the traps set by the business man, the expert of ledgers, for
the innocent amateur. We had actually got more pillow-cases than we were
entitled to. All unwittingly, in my eagerness to placate Sister, I had
published the mild chicanery in which she had indulged on behalf of her
ward. The sergeant, growing grey in the solution of these abstruse
mathematical and psychological mysteries, had suspected this Sister all
along. He enlightened me. She had recently been transferred from another
ward--and in her going had (against the rules) wafted with her a small
selection of that ward's property.... And now there would be a surprise
stocktaking in her new ward: the seven surplus pillow-cases--and perhaps
other loot--would have to be explained. Sister, in short, was in for a
_mauvais quart d'heure_.

It was a suitable penalty for her crossness. It should have taught her
the perils of crossness. With regret I add that she did not envisage the
episode in that light. She was merely rather crosser than before. It was
without any profound sorrow that I soon afterwards bade her farewell, on
her departure to overseas spheres of activity. But she had at least
afforded me a lesson in the importance of accuracy over my dirty and
clean linen bundles. Never again would I risk the ordeal of a surprise
stocktaking; never again would I risk a combat with a ledger-fortified
sergeant; never again would I risk any attempt at the tortuous in my
dealings with the classifications of the eighty-one items on the
tear-off leaf of that dire volume, the _Check Book for Hospital Linen_.

IX

ON BUTTONS

In one of his recent books Mr. H.G. Wells expresses a surprised
annoyance at the spectacle of spurs. Vast numbers of military gentlemen
(he observed at the front) go clanking about in spurs although they have
never had--and never will have--occasion to bestride a horse. Spurs are
a symbolic survival, a waste of steel and of labour in manufacture, a
futile expenditure of energy to keep clean and to put on and take off.

When I first enlisted I felt a similar irritation in regard to buttons.
His buttons are a burden to the new recruit. Time takes the edge off his
resentment. Time is a soother of sorrows, a healer of rancours, however
legitimate. Neverthele