Bubble!" said Hildegarde. "I have never
been in town in August, but I can imagine what it must be."

"I really don't know, Miss Hilda, whether you can," returned Bubble,
respectfully. "It isn't like any heat I ever felt at home. Can you
imagine your brains sizzling in your head, like a kettle boiling?"

"Oh, don't, Bubble!" cried Rose. "Don't say such things!"

"Well, it's true!" said the boy. "That's exactly the way it felt. It was
like being in a furnace,--a white furnace in the day-time, and a black
one at night; that was all the difference. I had my head shaved,--it's
growed now, but I'm going to have it done again, soon as I get
back,--and wore a flannel shirt and those linen pants you made, Pinkie.
I tell you I was glad of 'em, if I did laugh at 'em at first--and so I
got on. I wrote you that Dr. Flower had taken me to do errands for him
during vacation?" The girls nodded. "Well, I stayed at his house,--it's
a jolly house!--and 't was as cool there as anywhere. I went to the
hospital with him every day, and I'm going to be a surgeon, and he says
I can."

Hildegarde smiled approval, and Rose patted the flaxen head, and said,
"Yes, I am sure you can, dear boy. Do you remember how you set the
chicken's leg last year?"

"I told the doctor about that," said Bubble, "and he said I did it
right. Wasn't I proud! I held accidents for him two or three times this
summer," he added proudly. "It never made me faint at all, though it
does most people at first."

"Held accidents?" asked Hildegarde, innocently. "What do you mean,
laddie?"

"People hurt in accidents!" replied the boy. "While he set the bones,
you know. There were some very fine ones!" and he kindled with
professional enthusiasm. "There was one man who had fallen from a
staging sixty feet high, and was all--"

"Don't! don't!" cried both girls, in horror, putting their fingers in
their ears.

"We don't want to hear about it, you dreadful boy!" said Hildegarde.
"_We_ are not going to be surgeons, be good enough to remember."

"Oh, it's all right!" said Bubble, laughing. "He got well, and is about
on crutches now. Then there was a case of trepanning. Oh, that _was_ so
beautiful! You _must_ let me tell you about that. You see, this man was
a sailor, and he fell from the top-gallantmast, and struck--" But here
Rose's hand was laid resolutely over his mouth, and he was told that if
he could not refrain from surgical anecdotes, he would be sent back to
New Yo