hters," said he. "There was no end of a crowd
by this time. And Jock and some of the others fell over at the top
again. And there was a row with the ticket-collector. And people kept
saying they'd report me. _Me!_ And when I'd got my party down to the
bottom for the second time, and some of the tube officials had come and
said they couldn't allow it and we must buzz off home, I lined the
fellows up to march 'em to the train, and dash me if two weren't
missing. They'd given me the slip."

The two truants, it may be added, could not be found. Corporal Smith
had to return without them. At a late hour of the evening they appeared,
not an atom repentant, at the hospital, having persuaded someone to put
them into the correct bus. One of them, Jock, explained that, being from
the North, he had desired to seize this opportunity of seeing the sights
of London. Jock, I may remind you, is totally blind. Jock's guide, the
man who had volunteered to show him the sights and who had only once
been in London before, could see very faintly the difference between
light and dark.... Thus this pair of irresponsibles had fared forth into
the dusk of Regent Street.

* * * * *

It sounds a very horrible fate to be blinded. But somehow the blind men
themselves seldom seem to be overwhelmed by its horribleness. If you
want to hear the merriest banter in a war hospital, visit the blind
men's wards. The pathos of them lies less in the sadness of the victims
than in the triumphant, wonderful fact that they are _not_ sad. I wish
we others all inhabited the same mysteriously jocund spiritual realm as
Jock and his comrades, who come tramp-tramping to the concert-room down
the corridor from the D wards.

VI

WHEN THE WOUNDED ARRIVE

The receiving hall of the hospital is its clearing house of patients. It
is a huge room, with a lofty and echoing roof, a little in the style of
a church. Before the war, when the building was a school, this rather
grandiose apartment no doubt witnessed speechifyings and prize
distributions. May the time be not far distant when it will once again
be used for those observances! Meanwhile its vast floor is occupied by
ranks of beds.

Those beds are generally untenanted. Visitors who, like the lady in the
play, have taken the wrong turning, are apt to find themselves in the
receiving hall, and, gazing at its array of vacant beds, have been known
to conclude that the hospital was