hen you begin at
eight-and-thirty years----"

"You have all the wisdom of eight-and-thirty years to start with."

"There is only one thing more disastrous to a man than the wisdom of
thirty-eight years," I declared with mulish inconvincibility, "and that
is the wisdom he may accumulate after that age."

She sighed and abandoned the argument. "We are going to make you well in
spite of yourself," she said.

They, namely, the doctor, the nurse, and Lola, have done their best, and
they have succeeded. But their task has been a hard one. The patient's
will to live is always a great factor in his recovery. My disgust at
having to live has impeded my convalescence, and I fully believe that
it is only Lola's tears and the doctor's frenzied appeals to me not
to destroy the one chance of his life of establishing a brilliant
professional reputation that have made me consent to face existence
again.

As for the doctor, he was pathetically insistent.

"But you must get well!" he gesticulated. "I am going to publish it,
your operation. It will make my fortune. I shall at last be able to
leave this hole of an Algiers and go to Paris! You don't know what I've
done for you! I've performed an operation on you that has never been
performed successfully before. I thought it had been done, but I found
out afterwards my English _confreres_ were right. It hasn't. I've worked
a miracle in surgery, and by my publication will make you as the
subject of it famous for ever. And here you are trying to die and ruin
everything. I ask you--have you no human feelings left?"

At the conclusion of these lectures I would sigh and laugh, and stretch
out a thin hand. He shook it always with a humorous grumpiness which did
me more good than the prospect of acquiring fame in the annals of the
_Ecole de Medicine_.

Here am I, however, cured. I have thrown away the stick with which I
first began to limp about the garden, and I discourage Lola and Rogers
in their efforts to treat me as an invalid. Like the doctor, I have
been longing to escape from "this hole of an Algiers" and its painful
associations, and, when I was able to leave my room, it occurred to me
that the sooner I regained my strength the sooner should I be able to do
so. Since then my recovery has been rapid. The doctor is delighted, and
slaps me on the back, and points me out to Lola and the manager and the
concierge and the hoary old sinner of an Arab who displays his daggers,
and trays