great relief, then, when I reached the palace, and just
before I entered the room where the sick monarch was, to hear him
swearing vigorously, in a combination of the native and Spanish
languages which was as picturesque as it was expressive.

I found the man suffering from an acute attack of neuralgia, although
he did not know what was the matter with him. He had not been able
to sleep for three days and nights, and the pain, all the way up and
down one side of his face had been so intense that he thought he was
going to die, and almost hoped that he was. His head was tied up in a
lot of cloths, not over clean, in which a dozen native doctor's charms
had been folded, until the bundle was as big as four heads ought to be.

As soon as I found out what was the matter I felt relieved, for I
reckoned I could manage an attack of swelled head all right. I had
doctored the natives enough, already, to find out that they had no
respect for remedies which they could not feel, and so, going back
to the house, I brought from there some extra strong liniment, some
tincture of red pepper and a few powerful morphine pills.

I gave my patient one of the pills the first thing, administering
it in a glass of water with enough of the cayenne added to it so
that the mixture brought tears to his eyes, and then removing the
layers of cloth from his head, and gathering in as I did so, for my
collection of curiosities, the various charms which I uncovered, I
gave his head a vigorous shampooing with the liniment, taking pains to
see that the liquor occasionally ran down into the Sultan's eyes. He
squirmed a good deal, but I kept on until I thought it must be about
time for the morphine to begin to take effect. I kept him on morphine
and red pepper for three days, but when I let up on him he was cured,
and my reputation was made.

It would have been too great a nuisance to have been endured, had it
not been that so high a degree of royal favor enabled me to pursue
my work with a degree of success which otherwise I could never have
hoped for.

After that I used to see a good deal of the palace life. Although
nominally Mohammedans in religion, the inhabitants of these more
distant islands have little more than the name of the faith, and follow
out few of its injunctions. As a result I was accorded a freedom about
the palace which would have been impossible in such an establishment
in almost any other country.

One day the Sultan had invite