rooms assigned to them as officers in order that the P. D. A. might be properly recognized and quartered, to which the response was made with unflinching gravity that something certainly should be vacated "P. D. Q." if it took all his clerical force to effect it, but this was _sotto voce_, so to speak, and presumably unheard by the general commanding. It was gall of another kind, and wormwood, after these first few flattering receptions, to be greeted thereafter only by aides-de-camp or a military secretary; then to be told by the chief surgeon that, under instructions from Washington, only those nurses and attendants recognized and employed by the general government could be permitted to occupy quarters or walk the wards about the hospitals. It was bitter to find her criticisms and suggestions set at naught by "impudent young quacks," as she called the delighted doctors of the reserve hospitals, to see the sisterhood of the Red Cross presently clothed with the purple of authority as well as white caps and aprons, while she and, through her, the P. D. A.'s were denied the privilege of stirring up the patients and overhauling the storerooms. Then in her wrath Miss Perkins unbosomed herself to the press correspondents, a few of whom, seeking sensation, as demanded by their papers, took her seriously and told tremendous tales of the brutal neglect of our sick and wounded boys in hospital, of doctors and nurses in wild debauch on the choice wines and liquors sent for the sole use of the sick and wounded by such patriotic societies as the P. D. A.'s, and hinting at other and worse debaucheries (which she blushed to name), and involved in which were prominent officers and favorite members of a rival society "which shall be as nameless as it is shameless." All this had Miss Perkins accomplished within the first eight days of her sojourn, and by way of Hong-Kong the unexpurgated edition of her romance, thrown out by the conscienceless censor at head-quarters, eventually found its way to the United States. It was while in this uncharitable frame of mind that Miss Perkins caught sight of the little procession up the Santa Lucia when Maidie was transferred from ship to shore, and the refusal of the best looking of the "impudent young quacks" to permit her to see his patient that afternoon augmented her sense of indignity and wrong. Miss Ray herself went down in the black book of the P. D. A.'s forthwith.