For a fortnight, till an old American resident of Casablanca invited us to his house, we suffered Squall. We three slept on the roof while a decrepit, dirty Spaniard, the owner of the place, slept below. It was a modest, one-storey house, built in Moorish style. There were rooms on four sides of a paved courtyard, under a slab in the centre of which was the customary well. Overhead a covering of glass, now much broken, was intended to keep out the rain. The place had been looted by the Moors, who took away the few things of any value and destroyed the rest, leaving the room littered with torn clothes and bedding and broken furniture, if I might dignify the stuff by these names; nor had the old man (whose family had escaped to Tangier) cleared out any place but the kitchen and the courtyard. There was a little slave boy whose master had been killed, and who now served a ‘Mister Peto’ and came to us for water every day. As our old Spaniard would not keep the place clean and saved all the food that we left from meals (which filled the place with flies) we hired the boy for a peseta, about a franc, a day to keep it clean. He was to get nothing at all if he allowed in more than twenty-five flies, and for one day he worked well and got the money. But the reason of his success was the presence all that day of one or the other of us engaged at writing, protecting him from the wrath of the old man, who resented being deprived of both stench and flies. The next day when we returned from the French camp there was no more black boy, and we never saw him again, nor could we ascertain from the old man what had happened to him. Thereafter we never drew a bucket of drinking water from the well without the fear of bringing up a piece of poor ‘Sandy.’ As candles were scarce and bad we went to bed early. Weare and I generally retiring first. We climbed the rickety, ladder-like stairs and walked round the glass square over the courtyard to the side of the roof where cooling breezes blew from the Atlantic. There undressing, we rolled our clothes in tight bundles and put them under our heads for pillows. To lie on we had only sacking, for our rain-coats had to be used as covering to keep off the heavy dews of the early morning. Only Squall had a hammock.