Altercations, I am afraid, were not infrequent in the epoch when the actors in this drama were of the male sex. (Even now, when the scene is mainly feminine, I believe differences of opinion continue to arise, but doubtless the language in which they are conducted is seemlier if no less deadly.) The store-orderly had a marvellous eye for the difference between two kinds of shirts which are worn by our patients.  One kind has a pleat in the back, the other kind hasn’t; and I confess I occasionally transposed them, on the form.  It was fatal to do so.  There was a separate line for each brand of shirt and there must be a separate entry.  The store-orderly’s trained powers of observation could see that pleat, or the absence of it, even as the shirt slid across his line of vision in a torrent of other shirts.  His hand shot out and grabbed it back from joining the heap on the floor within the counter.  His pencil poised itself from the ticking-off of the items on the form.  “Wrong again!” he would cry, sometimes in anguish and sometimes in anger.  And there was nothing for it but to apologise.  To keep on good terms with the various orderlies in the various stores was the secret of making one’s life worth living—­a secret even profounder than that of keeping on good terms with Sister:  to be sure it was (though she seldom realised it) the very foundation of the art of keeping on good terms with her.  You could not even begin to please Sister unless, at the end of those incessant journeyings of yours which she did not see, you had dealings with store-orderlies who were obliging and who would give you the things which the taskmistress had sent you to fetch (or would drop a kindly hint as to where and by what means you could acquire them).  The Dirty Linen Store orderly who declined to accept your plea for forgiveness when you had been obtuse enough to see a fomentation-wringer in a teacloth, could devastate the harmony of a whole forenoon.  A sweet reasonableness was undoubtedly the note to strike when such a contretemps occurred.

Having got quit of the last item in your bundle, you returned to the ward to attend to other (and generally less entertaining) duties until such time as it was proper to repair to the Clean Linen Store.  The staff of the Clean Linen Store, a huge department whose system of book-keeping is enough to make the brain reel (for here sheets, etc., are dealt with not in dozens but in thousands), had in the interim received your chit from their colleagues of the Dirty Linen Store.  These latter, rashly or otherwise, had guaranteed its accuracy by initialing it.  Accordingly, in the Clean Linen Store, a fresh bundle was ready for your acceptance, its contents consisting of duplicates of the objects now on their way to the laundry.