At 10.30 a.m. the kitchen staff all came into the scullery and sat on boxes and drank cocoa, and ate bread and dripping (I hid the dripping part of mine) while the orderly and boy scout had theirs in the kitchen. After cocoa I helped with the potatoes and then cleaned saucepan lids. Then I washed up the men’s dinner things. They had had Irish stew and suet pudding. Have you ever washed a pudding cloth? My last job was the pig pail! In the happy past when I have gone and loved the little pigs at Uncle Jasper’s I never knew there was a pig pail. Ours stands outside the backdoor in the yard. It’s rather like a domed cathedral; into it you scrape the kipper skins and bits of bread and fat and apple cores, and things like that. I can do it now without active sickness. By the end of the week, perhaps, I need not shut my eyes or hold my nose. But my hands are disgusting. My finger-nails are in deep mourning and the grease will not come off. On Wednesday I committed the sin that can never be forgiven, for, unaddressed, I spoke to a General in front of matron, and I am to be shot at dawn on Friday. This is what happened. I was just about to replenish the pig pail, trying to screw up my courage to remove the dome from the cathedral, when round the house came matron in a very starched apron with several extra ramrods down her back. With her was a most splendid brass hat—rows of ribbons, gorgets, gold braid, all complete, and there were several other officers. Picture me standing by the pig bucket—I was not too clean. I hadn’t got my sleeves on, my arms were streaked with blue bell, and my cap was slightly crooked. Suddenly I looked at the advancing General, and I said quite loudly,— ’Toby, dear, what priceless luck!’ It was General Sir Tobias Merriwater, K.C.B., D.S.O., M.D., F.R.C.P. All I remembered was that I had known him all my life, and never called him anything but ’Toby’. Suddenly the warm spring day vanished, I was up at the North Pole, or the South one if it’s colder, as I saw the matron’s face. And then, by way of trying to ease the situation, I dropped the scullery pig pail, showered the kipper skins and apple cores, bits of bread and fat and suet, like rice and rose leaves at a wedding in the pathway of a bride. There was an awful silence, even the officers forgot to be bored, and looked quite interested. I drew back and wished I could get right inside the pig bucket, and shut down the lid. ’Ah,’ said General Sir Tobias Merriwater to the matron, ’you keep pigs?’ ’Yes, sir,’ said she. She was very bright and nice to him. (I understand people are always nice and bright to Generals.) ’And this is for them, I suppose. Most commendable, very.’ And the retinue passed on.