Of the happy days of boyish delight we editors spent with Mr. Kipling many brought incidents too trifling to be noted here, yet which went to fill a heaping loving cup of pleasant memories. "Heavens!" he once exclaimed, "how good it is to be with men who are doing things!" There was, for instance, the day when--as the reader may have perceived--two poems bore a note of merely suggested complaint from the sick in the hospitals. That note struck Mr. Kipling's sensibility, and he and Mr. Landon and I seized armsful of FRIENDS and set out upon a tour of the hospitals--then far too numerous in the public and semi-public buildings of the place. Mr. Kipling went ahead and distributed the papers, and we followed and whispered who he was to the sufferers in the cots. I never shall forget the look that came in each man's eyes, or how every one of them who was able raised himself upon an elbow to stare after the poet as he passed from room to room. "God bless him," they said; "he's the soldier's friend." And surely a blessing proceeded from him, in response to that which he received, for, at the knowledge of his presence, a new vigour and a sense of delight, such as they had almost forgotten how to feel, came to the sufferers. He had nothing of the theatrical about him, made no speeches, conversed in hushed tones, halted nowhere, posed not even to the slightest extent--but went on with doctor or nurse through the wards, listening and looking. I think that Mr. Landon and I were more conscious of the reflection of his fame than was he from whom it proceeded. At one stage of our adventure we determined to cross from one hospital to another, over some intervening gardens. What an unsuspected wildness lay among those walled enclosures in the confines of a nation's capital. Little hills, little rivers, marshes, precipices, walls on the edges of tiny cliffs! It proved a better feat for Italian cavalrymen than for a stout poet, a man with a game leg and arms in lint, and a third one who did not know it, but who was already poisoned with fever germs. However, we had set it for ourselves to do, and we did it--without any more serious mishap than a kick in the equatorial region which I bestowed on the poet in dropping over a wall. Mr. Kipling had other experiences with hospitals when we were with him and when he was by himself. He was qualified to testify as he did before the Commission that looked into the manner in which the care of the sick and wounded was bestowed.