It unsettles me as I lay my spoons and forks. Sixty-five trays. It takes an hour to do. Thirteen pieces on each tray. Thirteen times sixty-five ... eight hundred and forty-five things to collect, lay, square up symmetrically. I make little absurd reflections and arrangements--taking a dislike to the knives because they will not lie still on the polished metal of the tray, but pivot on their shafts, and swing out at angles after my fingers have left them. I love the long, the dim and lonely, corridor; the light centred in the gleam of the trays, salt-cellars, yellow butters, cylinders of glass.... Impermanency.... I don't wonder the Sisters grow so secret, so uneager. How often stifled! How often torn apart! It's heaven to me to be one of such a number of faces. To see them pass into Mess like ghosts--gentleman, tinker, and tailor; each having shuffled home from death; each having known his life rock on its base ... not talking much--for what is there to say?--not laughing much for they have been here too long--is a nightly pleasure to me. Creatures of habit! All the coloured dressing-gowns range themselves round the two long tables--this man in this seat, that man by the gas-fire; this man with his wheel-chair drawn up at the end, that man at the corner where no one will jostle his arm. Curious how these officers leave the hospital, so silently. Disappearances.... One face after another slips out of the picture, the unknown heart behind the face fixed intently on some other centre of life. I went into a soldiers' ward to-night to inquire about a man who has pneumonia. Round his bed there stood three red screens, and the busy, white-capped heads of two Sisters bobbed above the rampart. It suddenly shocked me. What were they doing there? Why the screens? Why the look of strain in the eyes of the man in the next bed who could see behind the screens? I went cold and stood rooted, waiting till one of them could come out and speak to me. Soon they took away the screen nearest to me; they had done with it. The man I was to inquire for has no nostrils; they were blown away, and he breathes through two pieces of red rubber tubing: it gave a more horrible look to his face than I have ever seen. The Sister came out and told me she thought he was "not up to much." I think she means he is dying. I wonder if he thinks it better to die.... But he was nearly well before he got pneumonia, had begun to take up the little habits of living. He had been out to tea. Inexplicable, what he thinks of, lying behind the screen. To-night I was laying my trays in the corridor, the dim corridor that I am likely often to mention--the occasional blue gas-lamps hanging at intervals down the roof in a dwindling perspective. The only unshaded light in the corridor hangs above my head, making the cutlery gleam in my hands. The swish-swish of a lame foot approached down the stone tiling with the tapping, soft and dull, of a rubber-tipped walking-stick.