“Knew you in two ticks,” grunted Bert.  “Same ol’ ’Arry.” (This was the derelict.) “Same ol’ ’Erb.” (This was the fat—­and once again jolly—­man.)

Explanations ensued.  Bert, the young soldier, was a native of these parts.  He had emigrated to Canada five years previously.  To-night, en route for the front, he had returned.  Earlier in the evening there had been ill-advised libations; he had started for his home, felt sleepy, sheltered from the wet in a tunnel quite familiar to him, and there been discovered by the ladies and roused by myself.  Arrived at the coffee-stall he had recognised in its proprietor a former pal and another former pal in ’Arry the derelict.  To throw the spoon at ’Arry was merely his playful mode of announcing his identity.

I left the trio reviewing the past and exchanging news of the present.  My services, it was clear, would no longer be required by the prodigal.  He and his mates gave me a hearty good-night.

I did not guess how intimate was soon to be my association with the Berts and ’Arries and ’Erbs of the world.  I was to be their servant, to wait upon them, to perform menial tasks for them, to wash them and dress them and undress them, to carry them in my arms.  I was to see them suffer and to learn to respect their gameness, and the wry, “grousing” humour which is their almost universal trait.  In my own wards, and elsewhere in the hospital, I came in close contact with many cockneys of the slums.  Even when one had not precisely “placed” a patient of this description, the relatives who came to him on visiting days gave the clue to the stock from which he sprang.  The mother was sometimes a “flower girl”; the sweetheart, with a very feathered hat, and hair which evidently lived in curling pins except on great occasions, probably worked in a factory.  These people, if the patient were confined to bed, sat beside him and talked in a subdued, throaty whisper.  But I have seen the same sort of patient, well enough to walk about, meet his folks on visiting afternoons at the hospital gate.  There is a crowd at the hospital gate, passing in and going out; hosts of patients are waiting, some in wheeled chairs and some seated on the iron fence which fringes the drive.  The reunions which occur at that gate are exceedingly public.  Our East Ender is perhaps accustomed to publicity; his slum does not conceal its feelings—­it quarrels, and makes love, without drawn blinds, and privacy is not an essential of its ardours.  Be that as it may, these meetings at the hospital gate, which are not lacking in pathos, have sometimes manifested a tear-compelling comicality when the actors in the drama belonged to the class which produced Bert.