in my breast-pocket--
pocket-book. Open it and take out a lancet."

"There isn't one here, sir."

"Bah! No; I remember. Get out your knife, my boy."

"There's a lancet in that, sir, you know, and a corkscrew, and tweezers
too. Here's the lancet, sir;" and the boy drew out the little
tortoiseshell instrument slipped into the handle of the handsome knife
which his uncle had presented him with before the start.

"Now, then, Mark; I am going to operate."

"Very well, sir," said Mark, calmly enough. "You had better take the
finger off close down to the joint, for fear the poison has got as far
as that."

The doctor smiled.

"Is it absolutely necessary?" said Sir James anxiously.

The doctor gave him a peculiar look which Dean looked upon as horribly
grim.

"I see two chaps who were bit by snakes out in 'Stralia, gentlemen,"
said Dan, "and one of them died; and they said that if there had been
someone there who had known how to cut his arm off so as he shouldn't
bleed to death, it would have saved his life."

"Kept the pison from running right through him, mate," growled Buck,
with a look of sympathy at the injured lad.

"That's so, messmate," continued Dan; "but they sucked t'other one where
he was stung for ever so long. He got better."

"Now, then," said the doctor sharply, "no more anecdotes, if you
please;" and as he spoke he made a slight cut across the speck-like
puncture with the keen-pointed lancet, so that the blood started out in
a pretty good-sized bead.

"Hurt you, my lad?" he asked, while Dean looked on in horror.

"Just a little," said Mark. "But hadn't you better do more than that?"

"No," said the doctor coolly. "There is a little poison there, and the
bleeding will relieve it. It has begun to fester."

"What, so soon?" said Sir James.

"Yes," was the calm reply. "Now, Dean, I must come to you for another
of your surgical instruments--the tweezers."

"Yes," cried the boy excitedly; and in his hurry he broke his thumb nail
in drawing the tweezers out of the haft of the knife, for the instrument
was a little rusted in.

"Now," said the doctor, as he pressed the two little spring sides of the
tweezers right down into the cut and got hold of something.

"Oh! hurts!" cried Mark.

"Yes, but it would have hurt more if I had taken your finger off," said
the doctor, laughing. "There we are," he continued, as he drew out a
sharp glistening point and held it up in the sun. "There's