but this time coming from under one of the men's beds. It was a piteous
mew, and I was determined to find it. I spent a quarter of an hour on
tiptoe looking everywhere. It was not till I heard a stifled chuckle
from the bed next the Dutchman's that I suspected anything, and then,
determined they should get no rise out of me, sat down quietly in my
chair again. Though that cat mewed for the next ten minutes I never
turned an eyelash!

I liked night duty very much, there was something exhilarating about it,
probably because I was new to it, and probably also because I slept like
a top in the daytime (when I didn't get up, breathe it quietly, to steal
out for rides on the sands!). I liked the walk across the yard with the
gaunt old Cathedral showing black against the purple sky, its poor East
window now tied up with sacking.

One night about 1 a.m. I came in from supper in my flat soft felt
slippers, and from sheer joy of living executed, quite noiselessly, a
few steps for Sister's benefit down the middle of the Ward! It was a
great temptation, and needless to say not appreciated by Sister as much
as I had hoped. I heard subdued clapping from the clown's bed, and there
was the wretch wide awake (he was not unlike Morton to look at), sitting
up in bed and grinning with joy!

The next morning as I was going off duty he called me over to him. "_He,
Miske Kinike_," he said, in his funny half Dutch, half Flemish, "if
after the war you desire something to do I will arrange that you appear
with me before the curtain goes up, at the Antwerp Theatre!" He made the
offer in all seriousness, and realizing this, I replied I would
certainly think the proposition over, and fled across to have breakfast
and tell them my future had been arranged for most suitably.