way, thank you for your trouble."

I fancy that I have made it clear before that Captain Kettle was a man
possessed not only of an iron nerve, but also of all a sailor's
handiness with his fingers; but here was a piece of work that required
all his coolness and dexterity. At home, on an operating table, with
everything at hand that antiseptic surgery could provide, with highly
trained surgeons and highly trained nurses in goodly numbers, it would
have been a formidable undertaking; but there, among those savage
surroundings, in that awful loneliness which a white man feels so far
away from all his kin, it was a very different matter.

It makes me shiver when I think how that little sailor must have
realized his risks and his responsibility. It was a situation that would
have fairly paralyzed most men. But from what can be gathered from the
last letter that the patient ever wrote, it is clear that Kettle carried
out the operation with indomitable firmness and decision; and if indeed
some of his movements were crude, he had grasped all the main points of
his hurried teaching, and he made no single mistake of any but pedantic
importance.

Clay woke up from the anaesthetic, sick, shaken, but still courageous as
ever. "Well," he gasped, "you've made a fine dot-and-go-one of me,
Skipper, and that's a fact. When you chuck the sea, and get back to
England, and set up in a snug country practice as general practitioner,
you'll be able to look back on your first operation with pride."

Kettle, shaken and white, regarded him from a native stool in the middle
of the hut. "I can't think," he said, "how any men can be doctors whilst
there's still a crossing to sweep."

"Oh," said Clay, "you're new at it now, and a bit jolted up. But the
trade has its points. I'll argue it out with you some day. But just at
present I'm going to try and sleep. I'm a bit jolted up, too."

Now, it is a melancholy fact to record that Dr. Clay did not pull round
again after his accident and the subsequent operation. To any one who
knows the climate, the reason will be easily understood. In that heated
air of Central Equatorial Africa, tainted with all manner of harmful
germs, a scratch will take a month to heal, and any considerable flesh
wound may well prove a death warrant. Captain Kettle nursed his patient
with a woman's tenderness, and Clay himself struggled gamely against his
fate; but the ills of the place were too strong for him, and the
inevit