you'll find the beauty has just walked through them."

"Soda or plain?" I asked, in parenthesis.

"Soda. I don't like the flavour of dead camel. A big drink,
please. I feel as if I were lined with sand-paper."

He slept that night in the little shanty built of mud and roofed
chiefly with old palm-mats, which was gracefully called the head
surgeon's quarters. That is to say, he partook of such hospitality
as I had to offer him.

Sammy and I had met before he had touched a rope or I a scalpel. We
hailed from the same part of the country--down Devonshire way; and,
to a limited extent, we knew each other's people--which little
phrase has a vast meaning in places where men do congregate.

We turned in pretty early--I on a hospital mattress, he in my bed;
but Sam would not go to sleep. He would lie with his arms above his
head (which is not an attitude of sleep) and talk about that
everlasting gun.

I dozed off to the murmur of his voice expatiating on the extreme
cunning of the ejector, and awoke to hear details of the rifling.

We did not talk of home, as do men in books when lying by a camp-
fire. Perhaps it was owing to the absence of that picturesque
adjunct to a soldier's life. We talked chiefly of the clever gun;
and once, just before he fell asleep, Sammy returned to the question
of the nurses.