But he only slept for half an hour. At the end of that time he was shaken roughly awake and told to get a move on, and to fall in outside the lines before hooking in his horses. He rose stiffly, sore in every joint and aching in every limb as if he had been beaten and bruised with a club. The fire was dead and he was chilled to the marrow with the cold that had struck in from his wet clothes, with the more miserable cold that comes out of late and insufficient sleep. He shook like a man in the ague, and his teeth chattered as he thrust his arms into the clammy dampness and coldness of his jacket’s clinging sleeves. Putting on his boots was sheer torture. They were icy cold, and the wet leather was stiff and hard as a board. Altogether he was just about as miserable, cold, and uncomfortable as a man can be, as he hobbled stiffly from the cook-house into the bitter rawness of the winter morning. As he went out one of the cooks came in and commenced to make up the fire, and it suddenly struck Driver Ruff what a magnificent and enviable job a cook had, always messing about with a warm fire and hot water and other of the pleasantest things in life. The cook, roused from a warm straw bed in the cold of one o’clock to light a fire with damp wood, probably held a different opinion of the pleasures of his office. Ruff had three minutes with his horses before the ‘Fall in’ was called. They whickered and nuzzled at him, each jealously pushing the other’s head aside as he spoke to them and rubbed their noses and pulled their ears. ‘After all, Golly,’ he said, ‘a cook don’t have horses; eh, Wog?’ and at that thought the cook’s job lost its savour and a gleam of content warmed the driver’s soul. A figure suddenly appeared in the shape of lamp-illumined breeches and boots and a blot of shadow above them, and his sergeant spoke briskly: ‘Hullo, Ruff. Merry Christmas.’ ‘Lumme!’ said Driver Ruff. ‘If I hadn’t clean forgot—same to you, sergeant.’ ‘An’ may we see the next at ’ome,’ said the sergeant. ‘Now what about this pair o’ yours? Had a stiffish day yesterday, didn’t they?’ Ruff told him briefly but pungently the sort of day they had had and the work they had done. He was so eloquent on their behalf—quite omitting any mention of his own sorrows—that the sergeant promised to manage it somehow that they’d get a light wagon-load that day and the other wagons share the balance. Driver Ruff began to feel the world not so bad a place after all, and even the briefly outlined programme of the day’s work to begin at once and keep on till evening did not cast him down. ‘They’ll do it easy with a light load,’ he said cheerfully. The ‘Fall in’ was called, and wondering rather at this unusual item of the morning’s work, the men fell in at the end of the horse lines, standing in an ankle-deep porridge of mud.