reserved for infectious cases--the Reverend Julius might have been said to
be marooned, had not his dark-eyed, transparent, wasted young face created
such hot competition among the nurses for the privilege of attending on
him, that he had frequently received breakfast and dinner in duplicate,
and once three teas. Some of the probationers, reared in the outer
darkness of Dissent, knew no better than to term him "the minister." To
the matron, who was High Church, he existed as "Father Fraithorn." Julius
is hardly complete to the reader without an intimation that he very dearly
loved to be dubbed "Father." The matron had never failed in this.

A letter from Father Tatham, Julius's senior at St. Margaret's, lay under
the bony hand--a mere bunch of fleshless fingers, in which the
skin-covered stick that had been a man's arm ended. Father Tatham wrote to
say that, after a bright, enjoyable summer holiday, spent with a chosen
band of West-Central London barrow-boys at a Rest Home at
Cookham-on-Thames, he has started his Friday evening Confirmation classes
for young costermongers in Little Schoolhouse Court, and obtained a record
attendance by the simple plan of rewarding punctual attendance and
ultimate mastery gained over the Catechism and Athanasian Creed with pairs
of trousers. Julius had shaken his head over the trousers, knowing that
the first walk taken by the garments in company with the winners would be
as far as the pop-shop. But lying there in the clean-smelling, airy
Hospital ward, he yearned with a mighty yearning for the stuffy
West-Central classroom, and the rowdy crew of London roughs hulking and
hustling on the benches, learning per medium of "the dodger," that one's
duty to one's neighbour was not to abuse him foully without cause, to
refrain one's hands from pocket-picking, shop-raiding, hustling, and
jellying heads with brass-buckled belts or iron knuckle-dusters, and not
to get drunk before Saturday night.

He had come out to South Africa upon the advice of
physicians--honestly-meaning wiseacres--ignorant of the shifts, the
fatigues, the inevitable exertions and privations that the panting,
tottering invalid must inevitably undergo, in company with the hale
traveller and the sound emigrant; the rough, protracted journeys, the
neglect and discomfort of the inns and taverns and boarding-houses, where
Kaffirs are the servants, and dirt and discomfort reign. He bore them
because he must, and struggled on, lea