d able to move on.

"Well, well," he said at last, "duty first and pleasure afterwards, as
you might have said yourself, Silver. Let us overhaul these patients of
yours."

A moment afterwards he had entered the blockhouse, and, with one grim
nod to me, proceeded with his work among the sick. He seemed under no
apprehension, though he must have known that his life, among these
treacherous demons, depended on a hair, and he rattled on to his
patients as if he were paying an ordinary professional visit in a quiet
English family. His manner, I suppose, reacted on the men, for they
behaved to him as if nothing had occurred--as if he were still ship's
doctor, and they still faithful hands before the mast.

"You're doing well, my friend," he said to the fellow with the bandaged
head, "and if ever any person had a close shave, it was you; your head
must be as hard as iron. Well, George, how goes it? You're a pretty
color, certainly; why, your liver, man, is upside down. Did you take
that medicine? Did he take that medicine, men?"

"Ay, ay, sir, he took it sure enough," returned Morgan.

"Because, you see, since I am mutineers' doctor, or prison doctor, as I
prefer to call it," says Doctor Livesey, in his pleasantest way, "I make
it a point of honor not to lose a man for King George (God bless him!)
and the gallows."

The rogues looked at each other, but swallowed the home-thrust in
silence.

"Dick don't feel well, sir," said one.

"Don't he?" replied the doctor. "Well, step up here, Dick, and let me
see your tongue. No, I should be surprised if he did; the man's tongue
is fit to frighten the French. Another fever."

"Ah, there," said Morgan, "that comed of sp'iling Bibles."

"That comed--as you call it--of being arrant asses," retorted the
doctor, "and not having sense enough to know honest air from poison, and
the dry land from a vile, pestiferous slough. I think it most
probable--though, of course, it's only an opinion--that you'll all have
the deuce to pay before you get that malaria out of your systems. Camp
in a bog, would you? Silver, I'm surprised at you. You're less of a fool
than many, take you all round; but you don't appear to me to have the
rudiments of a notion of the rules of health.

"Well," he added, after he had dosed them round, and they had taken his
prescriptions, with really laughable humility, more like charity
school-children than blood-guilty mutineers and pirates, "well, that's
done for to