. Among the practitioners, the cook,
with his usual severe expression, plied a neat pair of scissors. It
was a scene which reminded me of old trench life. I thought of a close
support trench opposite Auchy, about the month of June, 1916, where a
sickly programme of sniping by field guns, rifle grenades, "pineapples,"
and incredible escapes from them did not prevent my being shorn by the
steadiest of amateurs. With what outward intrepidity I sat there!

At the captain's request, the cook advanced to cut his hair. That done, he
cut mine. Venturing to talk, I was soon exchanging sallies of the British
Expeditionary Force, for he had been thereof, a tunneller. Of his being
in a countermined shaft at the wrong moment at Vimy, and his luck in
being dragged out by the sergeant-major, he gave some details; but the
first evident attack of mirth to which I had ever seen him give way
came as he mused over rations supplied by the French for a fortnight at
St. Quentin under some temporary arrangement. "Wine, beans, and b----
horseflesh," he said, _staccato_, and with a dry laugh like the rattling
of beans. "First we'd all get bound up and then we'd all get diarrhoea.
Oh, it was the hell of a go." "There," he said, leaving a little tuft over
my forehead, "you'll still be able to have a couple of quiffs there."

He was not only cook and hairdresser off duty, I found: he was given to
sketching portraits. I went once or twice to talk with him in the galley,
where the heat was enough to make the famous Lambert himself turn thin.
And his work, he pointed out, was continuous, with his assistant's
services; he had to put up double meals to suit the watches. "But why
do I stick it?" he said, taking a batch of bread from the oven and
standing it on end against the others. "A man can stick shore jobs all
right when there's five mouths depending on him. There's not a lot of
shore jobs now."

His drawings were done in the little corner where he and his mate had
their bunks. They were pictures of ladies and seamen of his acquaintance;
crude, with lips of a bitter redness, and cheeks faintly pink, staring
and disproportioned, yet done with such pains, such strivings after
"likeness," that when he requested me to help him to a post as artist
to _The Times_, I much wished that I could! I had no sooner made the
acquaintance of the cook's portraits than a poem was bashfully brought
to me by its author, Bicker. I must say that, although his lines had