resence of a mouse. She
retreated, and perhaps if any convalescent patient had been awake she
would have enlisted his aid to expel the mouse; but in the ward the
patients were, as one man, snoring vociferously. It was this slightly
overdone snoring, at the finish, which gave birth to suspicions and
caused the trick to be detected.

The night nurses do not have a placid time of it if their patients
are at the stage of recovery when spirits begin to rise and
the early slumber-hour which the hospital rules prescribe is not
welcome. String-actuated knaveries, more or less similar to the
mouse-in-the-kitchen one, are always devised for the plaguing of a new
night nurse. Sometimes in the dead of night, when utter silence broods
over the ward, the gramophone will abruptly burst into raucous music:
its mechanism has been released by a contrivance which gives no clue to
the crime's perpetrator. The flustered nurse gropes her way down the
ward and stops the gramophone, every patient meanwhile sitting up in bed
and protesting against her cruelty in having awakened them by starting
it. Half an hour after the ward has quietened, the other gramophone
(some wards own two) whirrs off into impudent song: it also has been
primed. Nurse is wiser on future occasions: she stows the gramophones,
when she comes on duty, where no one can tamper with them. Even so, she
may have her nerves preyed upon by eerie tinklings, impossible to locate
in the darkness; these are caused by two knives, hung from a nail fixed
high up in the rafters. By jiggling a string, which is conducted over
another rafter and down the wall to his pillow, the patient makes the
knifeblades clash. Sometimes two strings, leading to different beds,
complete this instrument of torture. After a determined search, nurse
finds one string, and, having cut it, flatters herself that she has got
the better of her enemies. Not a bit of it. She has scarcely settled in
her chair again before the tinklings recommence. The second string is in
action; and as she hunts about the ward for the source of the melody in
the ceiling, muffled convulsions of mirth, from the dim rows of beds,
furnish evidence that her naughty charges are not getting the repose
which they require and to ensure which is part of the purpose of her
presence.

A nurse who happens to be unpopular never has these pranks played upon
her. They are in the nature of a compliment. Nor do they occur in a
ward where there is a p