"I did not answer him in words. I gave him a look, and walked out. "My purpose had been to apply for temporary work, to relieve some younger teacher who wished to enlist for medical work at the front. Had you been in London, Roddy, I'd have pocketed shame and come to you, and borrowed the price of a suit of clothes; inside of which--and may be with your support--I might have walked up boldly for a commission in the R.A.M.C.--for there was nothing definite against me: only I was ruined, and my old credentials, set against my present squalor, were so comparatively splendid as to raise instant suspicion of drink and disgrace. But it was part of my just punishment that, when I most needed help, you should be far abroad searching for the very island on which I had shipwrecked all. "Finally I found work as a dresser in one of those temporary hospitals which sprang up everywhere in such hurry as the streams of wounded began to pour back from France. Ours was pitched in a derelict pleasure-ground on the right bank of Thames some way below Greenwich. . . . I don't suppose you ever visited Casterville Gardens: as neither had I until I entered them to do stretcher-drill, tend moaning men, and carry bloody slops in the overgrown alleys that wound among its tawdry, abandoned glories. It had a half-rotted pier of its own, upon which, in Victorian days, the penny steam-boats had discharged many thousands of crowds of pleasure-seekers. The gardens occupied the semicircle of an old quarry, on which the decorative landscape gardener had fallen to work with gusto, planting it with conifers and stucco statues in winding walks that landed you straight from the sightless wisdom of Socrates and Milton, or the equally sightless allurement of Venus, shielding her breasts, upon a skittle-alley, a bandstand, a dancing-saloon, or a bar at which stood, for contrast, another Venus, not eyeless, dispensing beer. The conifers, flourishing there, have grown to magnificent height. The effect of rain upon the statues has not been so happy, and I have set my pail down to pick a snail off the saddle-nose of Socrates and meditate and wonder what he would have thought of it all.