t dream a man could be so
content in the midst of such a hurricane of work. I'm done to a
standstill every day; I bump into difficulties and tackle
responsibilities that I hadn't even heard of in medical school, though I
haven't killed anybody yet. And all the time I remember how I used to
wish I might be the only doctor between Siam and sunrise. I'm plenty
near enough to that, in all conscience. The only doctor in this town of
one hundred thousand, and a district around us so big that I'm afraid to
measure it. On one side the next doctor is a good hundred miles away.
Now, do you know how I feel? Oh, yes; insufficient until it hurts like
the toothache, yet somehow as though I were carrying on here, not in
place of the man who has gone home on furlough, but in place of Jesus
Christ himself. You know I'm not irreverent; I might have been, but this
has taken all of the temptation out of me. It is his work, not mine."

J.W. turned to Marcia again. "I thought you said this Joe of yours was
miserable, I've seen him when he was enjoying himself pretty well, but I
never saw him like this."

"I know," Marcia admitted, "and I didn't mean he was really unhappy. But
it is a big strain, and there's no sign of its letting up until the
regular doctor gets back."

The next day J.W. watched his old friend amid the press of duties which
crowded the hours, and he marveled as much as the wretchedness of the
patients as he did at the steady resourcefulness of the man whom he had
known when he was Delafield's adventurous and spendthrift idler.

As he looked on, J.W. could understand something which had been a closed
book to him before. No one could stand by and see this abjectness of
need, this helplessness, this pathetic faith which was almost fatalistic
in the foreign doctor's miraculous powers--it recalled that beseeching
cry in the New Testament story, "Lord, if thou _wilt_ thou
_canst_"--without being deeply, poignantly glad that there were such men
as Joe Carbrook. It was all very well to talk at long range about
letting China and other places wait. But on the spot nobody could talk
that way.

The visit might have lasted two weeks, instead of two days, and then the
Carbrooks would have hung on and besought him to stay a little longer.
Torture would not have drawn any admission from them, but back of all
the joy in the work was a something that left them without words as J.W.
and his little group from Foochow set out for the next s