She
retreated, and perhaps if any convalescent patient had been awake she
would have enlisted his aid to expel the mouse; but in the ward the
patients were, as one man, snoring vociferously. It was this slightly
overdone snoring, at the finish, which gave birth to suspicions and
caused the trick to be detected.
The night nurses do not have a placid time of it if their patients
are at the stage of recovery when spirits begin to rise and
the early slumber-hour which the hospital rules prescribe is not
welcome. String-actuated knaveries, more or less similar to the
mouse-in-the-kitchen one, are always devised for the plaguing of a new
night nurse. Sometimes in the dead of night, when utter silence broods
over the ward, the gramophone will abruptly burst into raucous music:
its mechanism has been released by a contrivance which gives no clue to
the crime's perpetrator. The flustered nurse gropes her way down the
ward and stops the gramophone, every patient meanwhile sitting up in bed
and protesting against her cruelty in having awakened them by starting
it. Half an hour after the ward has quietened, the other gramophone
(some wards own two) whirrs off into impudent song: it also has been
primed.
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