The weather that day was disagreeable. There was a high wind and a leaden sky and the dust blew hard and gritty. When, on rising, I peeped out between the window curtains, it all looked very cold and wretched, the Medway--a most surly river--muddier than ever, the leaves of the willow trees wildly fluttering and showing their gray undersides. It seemed difficult to believe that one was really there, really about to go out into that gloom to breakfast instead of into a normal dining-room with a stove and a newspaper. But, on emerging, I found that though it looked so cold it was not intolerably so, and no rain in the night had, by drenching the long grass, added to our agonies. They were all at breakfast beneath the willows, holding on their hats with one hand and endeavouring to eat with the other, and they all seemed very cheerful. Edelgard, who had taken the coffee under her management, was going round replenishing the cups, and was actually laughing when I came out at something some one had just said. Remembering how we parted this struck me as at least strange. I made a point of at once asking for porridge, but luckily old James had not brought the milk in time, so there was none. Spared, I ate corned beef and jam, but my feet were still sore from the previous day’s march, and I was unable to enjoy it very much. The tablecloth flapped in my face, and my mackintosh blew almost into the river when I let it go for an instant in order to grasp the milk jug, and I must say I could not quite understand why they should all be so happy. I trust I am as willing to be amused as any man, but what is there amusing in breakfasting in a draughty meadow with everything flapping and fluttering, and the coffee cold before it reaches one’s mouth? Yet they were happy. Even Menzies-Legh, a gray-haired, badly-preserved man, older a good deal, I should say, than I am, was joking and then laughing at his jokes with the fledglings, and Lord Sigismund and Jellaby were describing almost with exultation how brisk they had felt after a bath they had taken at five in the morning in the Medway. What a place to be in at five in the morning. I shivered only to hear of it. Well, that which makes one man brisk is the undoing of another, and a bath in that cold, unfriendly stream would undoubtedly have undone me. I could only conclude that, pasty and loosely put together as they outwardly were, they must be of a very great secret leatheriness.