Slim reluctantly departed. I dared to hope we had seen the last of him. But before the afternoon was over he was back on his old perch. He had brought some little pills back with him. Just wait, I thought, until I meet that medical officer! Slim seldom feels attracted to the meals at the mess-hall. So he sits in the office and lives chiefly upon cheese, Y. M. C. A. cheese purchased to make sandwiches for the canteen at a cost of a dollar and a quarter a pound. Sometimes he fries himself eggs, taking whatever mess-kit, Harry’s or Jerry’s or mine, happens to be handy and never, in spite of anything I can say, will he wash it up after him! Sometimes Harry and Jerry and I decide that instead of going to mess we would like to have a supper-party at the canteen ourselves, and then the question is, how to get rid of Slim? “Slim, it’s getting near chow-time,” we say, “I’ll bet they’re going to have mashed potatoes and brown gravy tonight. Isn’t that ‘Soupy’ I hear going now?” But Slim refuses to budge any more than a bump on a log, so we usually have to end by inviting him. But if I find Slim a burden, how must the Chief feel toward him? For Slim has appropriated the extra cot in the office, which also serves as the Chief’s bed-room, and so has fairly camped down on him. And the Chief is a gentleman of nerves and delicate perceptions. “He gets up in the middle of the night,” confided the Chief to me today in an almost awe-struck voice, “and he goes for the water-bucket and drinks a half a pail without stopping. He makes a noise just like a horse swallowing it.” I have given up trying to do anything with Slim. Nothing that I can say seems to make the least impression on him. Slim is a married man, yet yesterday I caught him embracing Louise, Madame’s cross-eyed maid of all work, in the passage-way. I undertook to reprove him. “Why that ain’t nawthin!” he turned a blameless and unabashed eye upon me. “That’s jest a man’s nature.”