has no windows, because I am afraid that
one of my enemies may come at night when the lamp is burning in the
ward and shoot me through the window by its light."

Great as is the variety of physiognomy, of dress, and of dialect,
even more diverse are the complaints for which they come. Eye
diseases form more than a quarter of the whole, and few cases give
so much satisfaction both to surgeon and patient as these, in many
of which the surgeon is able to restore sight that has been lost for
years, and to send the patient back to his home rejoicing and full
of gratitude. Here is a Bannuchi malik suffering from consumption, a
not uncommon complaint in their crowded villages; next him is a Wazir
lad from the hills, Muhammad Payo by name, suffering from chronic
malarial poisoning. He is an old acquaintance, as he returns to his
home when he feels strong enough, and then, what with coarse fare and
exposure (for he is a poor lad), soon relapses and comes back to us
at death's door, as white as a sheet, and has to be nursed back again
to vigour. Just now he is convalescent, and is going about the ward
doing little services for the other patients, and telling them what to
do and what not to do, as though he had been in the hospital all his
life. Poor fellow! he has lost both his parents in a village raid,
and would have been dead long ago himself but for the open door of
the mission hospital.

In another bed is a fair-haired, blue-eyed boy of twelve from Khost,
suffering from disease of the bones of his right leg, which he has
not been able to put to the ground for two years. His home is eighty
miles away across the mountains, and he had no one to bring him to
Bannu, though he had begged some of the traders to let him sit on one
of their baggage camels; but who was going to inconvenience himself
with a friendless boy like that? He had heard such wonderful stories
of the cures effected in the Bannu Hospital from a man in his village
who had been an inmate for six weeks for an ulcer of the leg, that he
determined to get there by hook or by crook, and he had accomplished
the greater part of the journey crawling on his hands and knees,
with an occasional lift from some friendly horseman, and had been six
weeks on the road, begging a dinner here and a night's lodging there
from the villages through which he passed. When he arrived, his state
can be better imagined than described: the weary, suffering look of
his face; the few dirty r