sleeping, or reading, or lying still with wistful eyes.

"That's all right. You're going to die!" said a rosy--cheeked young
orderly, after taking my temperature and feeling my pulse. It was his
way of cheering a patient up. He told me how he had been torpedoed
in the Dardanelles while he was ill with dysentery. He indulged in
reminiscences with the New Zealand general who had a grim gift of
silence, but glinting eyes. In the bed on my left was a handsome boy
with a fine, delicate face, a subaltern in the Coldstream Guards, with a
pile of books at his elbow--all by Anatole France. It was the first time
I had ever laid in hospital, and I felt amazingly weak and helpless, but
interested in my surroundings. The day nurse, a tall, buxom New Zealand
girl whom the general chaffed with sarcastic humor, and who gave back
more than she got, went off duty with a cheery, "Good night, all!" and
the night nurse took her place, and made a first visit to each bed. She
was a dainty little woman with the complexion of a delicate rose and
large, luminous eyes. She had a nunlike look, utterly pure, but with a
spiritual fire in those shining eyes of hers for all these men, who were
like children in her hands. They seemed glad at her coming.

"Good evening, sister!" said one man after another, even one who had
laid with his eyes closed for an hour or more, with a look of death on
his face.

She knelt down beside each one, saying, "How are you to-night?" and
chatting in a low voice, inaudible to the bed beyond. From one bed I
heard a boy's voice say: "Oh, don't go yet, sister! You have only given
me two minutes, and I want ten, at least. I am passionately in love with
you, you know, and I have been waiting all day for your beauty!"

There was a gust of laughter in the ward.

"The child is at it again!" said one of the officers.

"When are you going to write me another sonnet?" asked the nurse. "The
last one was much admired."

"The last one was rotten," said the boy. "I have written a real corker
this time. Read it to yourself, and don't drop its pearls before these
swine."

"Well, you must be good, or I won't read it at all."

An officer of the British army, who was also a poet, hurled the
bedclothes off and sat on the edge of his bed in his pajamas.

"I'm fed up with everything! I hate war! I don't want to be a hero! I
don't want to die! I want to be loved!... I'm a glutton for love!"

In his pajamas the boy looked a child, no