y from her a little; and as I did so, she uttered a prolonged moan,
and her almost bursting eyeballs vented hot, murky tears which trickled
down her tense and livid features.

Thereupon I turned to her again, and, throwing down cooking-pot,
teapot, and wallet, laid her on her back, and strove to bend her knees
upwards in the direction of her body. Meanwhile she sought to repel me
with blows on face and breast, and at length rolled on to her stomach.
Then, raising herself on all fours, she, sobbing, gasping, and cursing
in a breath, crawled away like a bear into a remoter portion of the
thicket.

"Beast!" she panted. "Oh, you devil!"

Yet, even as the words escaped her lips, her arms gave way beneath her,
and she collapsed upon her face, with legs stretched out, and her lips
emitting a fresh series of convulsive moans.

Excited now to fever pitch, I hurriedly recalled my small store of
knowledge of such cases and finally decided to turn her on her back,
and, as before, to strive to bend her knees upwards in the direction of
her body. Already signs of imminent parturition were not wanting.

"Lie still," I said, "and if you do that it will not be long before you
are delivered of the child."

Whereafter, running down to the sea, I pulled up my sleeves, and, on
returning, embarked upon my role, of accoucheur.

Scoring the earth with her fingers, uprooting tufts of withered grass,
and struggling to thrust them into her mouth, scattering soil over her
terrible, inhuman face and bloodshot eyes, the woman writhed like a
strip of birch bark in a wood fire. Indeed, by this time a little head
was coming into view, and it needed all my efforts to quell the
twitchings of her legs, to help the child to issue, and to prevent its
mother from thrusting grass down her distorted, moaning throat.
Meanwhile we cursed one another--she through her teeth, and I in an
undertone; she, I should surmise, out of pain and shame, and I, I feel
certain, out of nervousness, mingled with a perfect agony of compassion.

"O Lord!" she gasped with blue lips flecked with foam as her eyes
(suddenly bereft of their colour in the sunlight) shed tears born of
the intolerable anguish of the maternal function, and her body writhed
and twisted as though her frame had been severed in the middle.

"Away, you brute!" was her oft-repeated cry as with her weak hands,
hands seemingly dislocated at the wrists, she strove to thrust me to a
distance. Yet all the t