nor Zulu, but English, which
impresses on us that it is never too late to mend!" He looked at a
tarnished Waterbury watch, worn on a horse's lip-strap. "I am due to
inspect the Hospital tomorrow at ten o'clock sharp. If you will meet me
there punctually at the half-hour, I shall have the pleasure of
introducing you to--your Colleagues of the Medical Staff. And now, if you
please, as I have just five minutes left to spare, we will have a look at
those carboys of carbolic."

"They are in the old Chinese godown at the bottom of the garden," said
Saxham. He felt in one of the baggy pockets of the old tweed coat, pulled
out a key, and offered it silently to the conqueror, who motioned it back.

"Keep it, if you'll be so good. We'll send a waggon and a careful man or
two round from the Army Service Stores Department within an hour; for that
stuff in your friend's carboys is more precious than rubies to us just
now--a man's life in every teaspoonful. And if, as you tell me, there is
some mercurial perchloride, Taggart and the Medical Staff will jump for
joy. What we owe to Lister, Koch, and those fellows! You'd say so if you'd
ever seen gangrene on War Hospital scale--in Afghanistan, in 1880, even as
recently as the Zululand Campaign of 1888. The Pathan and the Zulu are
slim, and the Boer is even slimmer, but the wiliest customer of 'em all is
the Microbe. No wonder Wellington's old campaigners used to slit the
throats of badly-wounded soldiers, or that the ambulance-men of Soult and
Bonaparte were merciful enough to knock on the head every poor beggar who
had been bayonetted in the body. They knew there was not the atom of a
chance. But to-day we know how to deal with the invisible enemy. Thanks to
Antiseptic Surgery, that younger daughter of Science and Genius, as some
smart fellow puts it in the _National Review_."

And the pleasant little tune was whistled through to its final grace-note
as the two men went down the house-passage and crossed the garden. Verily,
to some other men that have lived since Peter of the Nets has it been
given to be fishers of their kind! This man said that night to an officer
of the Staff:

XIX

"I landed twenty carboys of carbolic to-day, and a lot of other Hospital
stores, by talking football to a man who knows the game, chiefly from the
ball's point of view."

"That counts to you, Colonel," called out Beauvayse, the Chief's fair,
boyish junior aide-de-camp, from the bottom