TheCompleteMemoirsOfGeorgeSherston

Slateford I suffer from a shortage of anything to say.
The most memorable events must have occurred in
my cranium. While Rivers was away on leave only
one event occurred which now seems worth record-
ing. The sun was shining brightly and I was giving
my golf clubs a rub up after breakfast, when an or-
derly brought me a mysterious message. Doctor Mac-
amble had called to see me. I had no notion who he
was, but I was told that he was waiting in the en-
trance hall, Let me say at once that I do not know
for certain whether Doctor Macamble has "passed
to where beyond these voices there is peace". But,
whatever his whereabouts may be at the moment of
writing, in October 1917 he was, to put it plainly,
a quiet-looking man who talked too much. I will go
even further and suggest that at least half the time he
was talking through his hat—that brown and broad-
brimmed emblem of a cerebral existence—which he
was holding in his left hand when I first encountered
his luminous eye in the hall of the hospital.

"Second-Lieutenant Sherston?" He grasped my
hand retentively.

Now to be addressed as "Second-Lieutenant" when
one happens to be drawing army pay for refusing to
go on being one was not altogether appropriate; and
the—for him—undiffuse greeting struck me as strik-
ing an unreal note. Had he said, "Dr. Livingstone, I
presume," I should have accepted his hand with a
fuller conviction that he was a kindred spirit. But he
went from bad to worse and did it again. "Second-
Lieutenant Sherston," he continued, in a voice which
more than "filled the hall", "I am here to offer you
my profoundest sympathy and admiration for the
heroic gesture which has made your name such a..."
(here he hesitated, and I wondered if he was going
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