Our kit was put on board the wagon, a place made with our rugs for Greenwood to rest his broken shoulder, and an orderly named Mathews, who was being sent back to Angora for breaking barracks repeatedly, was to do servant for us. This was untold luxury compared with our trip to Kastamuni eighteen months before, but I was terribly depressed over my book and parts of this diary. Valuable or worthless, it stood in any case for a part of my life, and I felt as though something very close to me had been snatched away. For many months here and there I had written this. It was a history written among dying men, not of them, but of many things, and such that I can never reproduce. On many a night in winter, by a black smoky oil light bought with money saved from my tobacco or mastik money, I had worked with the flickering wick near my bandaged eyes, my two worn blankets wrapped around my legs and feet, stockings around my head and neck to keep out the paralysing cold. Outside was three feet of snow, and sleet and wind from the Russian waste blew icily over the Black Sea straight to my window. Ours was the highest and coldest house in camp, and faced the north high on the bluff above the town. And so I wrote and re-wrote until often only my writing hand remained unfrozen. Before leaving Kastamuni we had to wait two or three hours for the gendarmes that were to accompany us. I was not allowed to visit the two shops to rectify my accounts, so carefully did they watch any one leaving lest any communication should be set up for those left behind. I went to the Lower House to say good-bye to some friends, including Square Peg, at work on law. His friend, whom we called the Count (Horwood), was most sympathetic over my book, and took me to the bar to have a last bottle of beer (so-called) that had arrived. This beer, to me so long estranged, was so good that I bucked up to a degree, and decided, as I have always tried to do since in moments of catastrophe, to merely suspend judgment and my grief. At the time it is too much deliberately not to care or to try to diminish the size of the catastrophe. At last we were rushed off, crowds of people following us, and small boys wanting tips, and many peasants whose faces one knew were honestly grieved to lose us, and possibly our money as well. Last of all Sonia, our Sonia, who had on occasion had quite an amount to do with me, and had danced to my fiddle and carried notes for me, and decoyed the postas from my rendezvous in the castle, followed us for miles with her basket, crying bitterly. She was a case-hardened daughter of Eve, a wild little untamed savage, but pretty and entrancing and very daring. She waved to me, and threw many kisses with lightning rapidity when the gendarmes were not looking, then followed the river bank to her destiny, and we rounded a bend towards ours.