been shot through the thigh while tending his flocks,
and eight rough-looking tribesmen of his have bound him securely on a
bed and carried him down, journeying all night through, and they have
left their rifles, without which they could not have ventured out,
at the police post on the frontier. Another of those on the beds is a
man of about fifty years, suffering from dropsy. He has been carried
sixty miles on this bed from Khost, a district in Afghanistan. A third,
who has been brought from another transfrontier village on an ox, is
suffering from a tumour of his leg, which will require amputation. And
so on with some half-dozen others. After this brief examination,
saying a word of welcome to the travel-stained Afghans who have borne
their precious burdens in with so much labour, and even danger, and
with a word of comfort and reassurance to the sick ones themselves,
the doctor enters his consulting-room, and the patients are brought in
one by one to be examined. Those requiring in-patient treatment are
sent off to the wards, and the remainder get the required medicines,
or have their wounds dressed and leave for their homes.

A great number of the out-patients are cases of eye disease, and
sometimes four or five blind men will come in a line, holding on to
each other, and led by one who is not yet quite blind. Very likely
they have trudged painfully upwards of a hundred miles, stumbling over
the stones in the mountain roads, and arriving with wounded feet and
bruised bodies. They sit together, listening, perhaps for the first
time in their lives, to the Gospel address, and eagerly awaiting
the interview with the doctor, when they will hear if they are to
receive their sight there and then, or to undergo an operation,
or what. For the stories they have heard of the power of Western
skill lead them to believe that if the doctor does not cure them on
the spot it must be that he is too busy or they are too poor. When,
therefore, as sometimes happens, the doctor sees at the first glance
that the case is a hopeless one, and that the sight is gone never to
be brought back, it is a painful duty to have to explain the fact to
the patient, and often the doctor needlessly prolongs the examination
of the eye lest the man should think that it was want of interest
in his case that makes the doctor say he can do nothing. And then
the beseeching, "Oh, sahib, just a little sight!" "See, I can tell
light from darkness; I can see the