clinical thermometer into his armpit and counted his pulse
rate. It amounted to 120 per minute, and his temperature proved to be
104 degrees. Clearly it was a case of remittent fever, such as occurs in
men who have spent a great part of their lives in the tropics.

"There is no danger," I remarked. "With a little quinine and arsenic we
shall very soon overcome the attack and restore his health."

"No danger, eh?" he said. "There never is any danger for me. I am as
hard to kill as the Wandering Jew. I am quite clear in the head now,
Mary; so you may leave me with the doctor."

Mrs. Heatherstone left the room-rather unwillingly, as I thought--and
I sat down by the bedside to listen to anything which my patient might
have to communicate.

"I want you to examine my liver," he said when the door was closed. "I
used to have an abscess there, and Brodie, the staff-surgeon, said that
it was ten to one that it would carry me off. I have not felt much of it
since I left the East. This is where it used to be, just under the angle
of the ribs."

"I can find the place," said I, after making a careful examination;
"but I am happy to tell you that the abscess has either been entirely
absorbed, or has turned calcareous, as these solitary abscesses will.
There is no fear of its doing you any harm now."

He seemed to be by no means overjoyed at the intelligence.

"Things always happen so with me," he said moodily. "Now, if another
fellow was feverish and delirious he would surely be in some danger, and
yet you will tell me that I am in none. Look at this, now." He bared
his chest and showed me a puckered wound over the region of the heart.
"That's where the jezail bullet of a Hillman went in. You would think
that was in the right spot to settle a man, and yet what does it do but
glance upon a rib, and go clean round and out at the back, without so
much as penetrating what you medicos call the pleura. Did ever you hear
of such a thing?"

"You were certainly born under a lucky star," I observed, with a smile.

"That's a matter of opinion," he answered, shaking his head. "Death
has no terrors for me, if it will but come in some familiar form, but I
confess that the anticipation of some strange, some preternatural form
of death is very terrible and unnerving."

"You mean," said I, rather puzzled at his remark, "that you would prefer
a natural death to a death by violence?"

"No, I don't mean that exactly," he answered. "I am too