dred francs. From the same firm it would
also be possible to obtain two very nice artificial arms, light, easily
adjustable, well hinged. A hideous flabby heap, called a nose, fashioned
by unique skill out of the flesh of his breast, replaced the little snub
nose that Antoine remembered. The mouth they had done little with. All
the front teeth were gone, but these could doubtless be replaced, in
time, by others. Across the lad's forehead was a black silk bandage,
which could be removed later, and in his pocket there was an address
from which artificial eyes might be purchased. They would have fitted
him out with eyes, in the provinces, except that such were better
obtainable in Paris. Antoine looked down upon this wreck of his son that
lay before him, and the wreck, not appreciating that he was a surgical
triumph, kept sobbing, kept weeping out of his sightless eyes, kept
jerking his four stumps in supplication, kept begging in agony:

"Kill me, Papa!"

However, Antoine couldn't do this, for he was civilized.

AT THE TELEPHONE

As he hadn't died in the ambulance, coming from the _Poste de Secours_,
the surgeons concluded that they would give him another chance, and risk
it on the operating table. He was nearly dead, anyway, so it didn't much
matter, although the chance they proposed to give him wasn't even a
fighting chance--it was just one in a thousand, some of them put it at
one in ten thousand. Accordingly, they cut his clothes off in the _Salle
d'Attente_, and carried him, very dirty and naked, to the operating
room. Here they found that his ten-thousandth chance would be diminished
if they gave him a general anaesthetic, so they dispensed with chloroform
and gave him spinal anaesthesia, by injecting something into his spinal
canal, between two of the low vertebrae. This completely relieved him of
pain, but made him talkative, and when they saw he was conscious like
that, it was decided to hold a sheet across the middle of him, so that
he could not see what was going on, on the other side of the sheet,
below his waist.

The temperature in the operating room was stifling hot, and the sweat
poured in drops from the brows of the surgeons, so that it took an
orderly, with a piece of gauze, to swab them constantly. However, for
all the heat, the man was stone cold and ashen grey, and his nostrils
were pinched and dilated, while his breath came in gasps, forty to the
minute. Yet, as I say, he was talkative,