The Medical Officer--"Doc," familiarly--was a Scotchman with a burr and a subtle uncaledonian quality of humour, and a sparkling intellectuality quite out of harmony with the traditional Scotch lumbering cerebration. Doc was lovable; and a butt through his popularity, though not a butt who took it lying down. But he was never a match for Gordon, though he usually routed the Captain--also a Scotchman--whose hobby was the facetious discussion of ways and means to getting a competent M.O. attached. The Doc's duties were purely nominal, the care of any who might fall victims amongst the Angleseys to toothache, boils, vermin, colds, gashes--any ills, in short, to which men in a desert camp might be liable. For the rest, he shot with the mess, dawdled with "films," perused his Scotch newspapers, improvised schemes in sanitation, dabbled in canal parasites and mosquito larvæ, and forged jokes. Seymour was a highly-intelligent animal (taking seven-and-five-eighths in hats), who argued with a kind of implacable ferocity, and when he sat down to bridge would never stop before two or three. But all his argument was for mental exercise and not from conviction, and his fiercest encounters were wont to end in a thrust of bathos at which the mess roared. He was a fine intellectual and physical animal, as keen in riding and shooting and bathing as in dialectic. The Captain was a diminutive, ceremonious Scotchman, commanding deference out of doors, bullied to death in the mess by his Subalterns. The contrast between out- and indoors was striking. The last letter of the law in discipline and ceremony was observed outside the mess, but at table no Australian officers' mess was ever more informal. Barriers of rank were thrown down, and none but surnames tolerated by the least even unto the greatest. That mess was as luxuriously appointed as a civilian home. Easy-chairs, writing-tables, messing-tables and their appointments, punctilious servants, matted floors, made one forget for a few hours daily that a war was in progress. For the man who makes himself at home on service you are commended to the English officer. And in a permanent camp such as this he excelled himself. Eating was delicate, glass and silver shone and prevailed. Hours for meals were late and irregular: breakfast at 8.30; lunch light, and at any time; dinner at any hour between 8 and 9.30, and long-drawn-out, so that you generally rose from table between 10 and 11, and sat back for pow-wow after. It was a rare day there was not game in the mess. Adjoining the sweet-water canal was a lagoon, reed-fringed and with reed-islands where you could row a mile and believe yourself in Australia; no sand to be seen. Three times a week we shot. There were duck and snipe and teal. The Sheikh of the village furnished half a dozen shot-guns and as many boats and boatmen, and came himself, carrying a gun (and proud he was of his shooting--and justly so).