f his face moved, and, except at the moment when the pin
was thrust under the vein, when his hand contracted on the bench, it
could not have been told that he was undergoing an operation of any
kind.

This over, we set out on our return with Mr. Camerden to the ruins, but
had hardly left the gate of the cattle-yard, when we met an Indian with
his arm in a sling, coming in search of Doctor Cabot. A death-warrant
seemed written in his face. His little wife, a girl about fourteen
years old, soon to become a mother, was trotting beside him, and his
case showed how, in those countries, human life is the sport of
accident and ignorance. A few days before, by some awkwardness, he had
given his left arm a severe cut near the elbow with a machete. To stop
the bleeding, his wife had tied one string as tightly as possible
around the wrist, and another in the hollow of the arm, and so it had
remained three days. The treatment had been pretty effectual in
stopping the bleeding, and it had very nearly stopped the circulation
of his blood forever. The hand was shrunken to nothing, and seemed
withered; the part of the arm between the two ligatures was swollen
enormously, and the seat of the wound was a mass of corruption. Doctor
Cabot took off the fastenings, and endeavoured to teach her to restore
the circulation by friction, or rubbing the arm with the palm of the
hand, but she had no more idea of the circulation of the blood than of
the revolution of the planets.

The wound, on being probed, gave out a foul and pestilential discharge,
and, when that was cleared away, out poured a stream of arterial blood.
The man had cut an arterial vein. Doctor Cabot had no instruments with
him with which to take it up, and, grasping the arm with a strong
pressure on the vein, so as to stop the flow of blood, he transferred
the arm to me, fixing my fingers upon the vein, and requesting me to
hold it in that position while he ran to the ruins for his instruments.
This was by no means pleasant. If I lost the right pressure, the man
might bleed to death; and, having no regular diploma warranting people
to die on my hands, not willing to run the risk of any accident, and
knowing the imperturbable character of the Indians, I got the arm
transferred to one of them, with a warning that the man's life depended
upon him. Doctor Cabot was gone more than half an hour, and during all
that time, while the patient's head was falling on his shoulder with
fainti