The second series of folderies to which the novice was initiated concerned themselves with his bedding. This consisted of a mattress, three blankets and a pillow. It is an outfit at which no one need turn up his nose. I never spent a bad night in army blankets, though when out on leave I am sometimes a victim of insomnia between clean cold sheets. But the moment the Reveille uplifted you from your couch, that couch had to be made ship-shape according to rule. No finicky "airing"! The mattress must be rolled up, with the pillow as its core, and placed at the end of the bed. On top of it a blanket, folded longwise and with the ends hanging down, was laid neatly; on top of _that_ you put the other two blankets, folded quite otherwise; then you brought the first blanket's ends over, and reversed the resultant bundle and pressed it down into a thin stratified parallelogram with oval ends. The strata of the said parallelogram, viewed from the aisle, must show no blanket _edges_, only curves of the blankets' folds: the edges (if visible at all) must face inwards, not outwards. Correct folding, to be sure, gave no visible edges, viewed from either side; and, once you caught the knack, correct folding was just as easy as incorrect--though there were temperaments which did not find it so and which rebelled against these niceties. I was afterwards to learn that this mania for matching (if mania be indeed a legitimate word for a custom based on common-sense principles and seldom carried to the extremes which the recruit has been led to fear) obtains not only in the army but also in the nursing profession. Not long after I became a ward orderly I got a wigging from my "Sister" because I had not noticed that every pillow-case of a ward's beds must face towards the same point of the compass: the pillows on the vista of beds must be placed in such a manner that the pillow-case mouths are, all of them, turned away from anyone entering the ward's door. Similarly the overlap of the counterpanes must all be of exactly the same depth and caught up at exactly the same angle, the resulting series of pairs of triangles all ending at exactly the same spot in each bedstead. These trifles reveal at a glance the professional touch in a ward, and are, I understand, not by any means the insignia of a military as distinct from a civilian hospital. They may or may not contribute to the comfort of the patient, but they betoken the captaincy of one whose methodicalness will in other and less visible respects most emphatically benefit him.