he helps to dress Vossaert, whose limbs are numb
and painful.

At eight o'clock, the ward is in perfect order, and as the dressings are
about to begin, Mehay suddenly appears in a fine clean apron. He watches
my hands carefully as they come and go, and he is always in the right
place to hand the dressing to the forceps, to pour out the spirit, or
to lend a hand with a bandage, for he very soon learned to bandage
skilfully.

He does not say a word; he just looks. The bit of his forehead that
shows under his own bandages is wrinkled with the earnestness of his
attention--and he has those blue marks by which we recognise the miner.

Sometimes it is his turn to have a dressing. But scarcely is it
completed when he is up again with his apron before him, silently busy.

At eleven o'clock, Mehay disappears. He has gone, perhaps, to get a
breath of fresh air? Oh, no! Here he is back again with a trayful of
bowls. And he hands round the soup.

In the evening he hands the thermometer. He helps the orderlies so much
that he leaves them very little to do.

All this time the bones of his skull are at work under his bandages, and
the red flesh is growing. But we are not to trouble about that: it will
manage all alone. The man, however, cannot be idle. He works, and trusts
to his blood, "which is healthy."

In the evening, when the ward is lighted by a night-light, and I come
in on tiptoe to give a last look round, I hear a voice laboriously
spelling: "B-O, Bo; B-I, Bi; N-E, Ne, Bobine." It is Mehay, learning to
read before going to bed.

VI

A lamp has been left alight, because the men are not asleep yet, and
they are allowed to smoke for a while. It would be no fun to smoke,
unless one could see the smoke.

The former bedroom of the mistress of the house makes a very light,
very clean ward. Under the draperies which have been fastened up to the
ceiling and covered with sheets, old Louarn lies motionless, waiting for
his three shattered limbs to mend. He is smoking a cigarette, the ash
from which falls upon his breast. Apologising for the little heaps of
dirt that make his bed the despair of the orderlies, he says to me:

"You know, a Breton ought to be a bit dirty."

I touch the weight attached to his thigh, and he exclaims:

"Ma doue! Ma doue! Caste! Caste!"

These are oaths of a kind, of his own coining, which make every one
laugh, and himself the first. He adds, as he does every day:

"Doctor, you never hur