Night after night old Dad Hobson would stay awake till two or three o’clock, without complaint or murmur. Any man a little past his prime was called ‘dad’ or described as ‘old’ in this land of youth. And in sober fact Dad Hobson had seven children. He had been a miner before he made the great sacrifice that had left him maimed and insane. He was always courteous, always considerate. Even on those days when he refused to eat it was with a polite ‘I’m sorry not to oblige you, nurse.’ He believed himself guilty of some crime—he had murdered Sir Ian Hamilton—and in trivial ways too he held himself responsible for any disturbance in that much-disturbed ward. At times he was so much better that we hoped he was regaining his wits, but always there would come a relapse and his face would be downcast, and ‘I’m puzzled someway, something’s wrong. I can’t get things clear in my mind,’ would be the explanation. He had odd delusions too, for a doctor clad in a dressing-gown provoked his question to an orderly, ‘Is that Lord Nelson?’ It was a strange little party altogether in that ward. Hobson would lie there by the hour, dimly annoyed by Jimmy in the bed opposite. Jimmy had nearly died of wounds and later of pneumonia, but he had rallied, only to reach a state of discomfort and nervous temper that was liable to fiendish explosions. For the most part he was a lovable boy, with a curious charm of his own. Sleepless, like Hobson, till the small hours, he played cards with the orderlies. When things pleased him Jimmy was an angel, but at other times he was a fiend. A certain soldier, a clarionet player once in the Queen’s Hall orchestra, came to the ward. He was suffering from insomnia and melancholia. Jimmy’s drawling voice and his card-playing and, perhaps, his popularity annoyed the clarionet player, and they quarrelled. Jimmy merely remarked: ‘I’ll do for him—see if I don’t.’ The clarionet player was removed to the next ward, separated from the other only by a glass and wood partition. ‘He shan’t sleep to-night if I don’t,’ said Jimmy, and he took careful aim at the glass partition with his tin mug. He hit the woodwork and missed his enemy’s head in the next ward, so he fell into heavy-browed sulking, with the threat ‘I’ll do for myself.’ This is often a mere threat, but he did make an endeavour by biting up a blue-lead pencil—a tedious and uncertain form of suicide. The pencil was taken away and, blue-lipped and weary, like a naughty child he fell asleep. Poor Jimmy! He went to a Scottish asylum where many of our patients were sent for further treatment. I heard lately that he was really better and likely to be discharged.