all and rather thin man,
with dark-brown hair, beard, and moustache; he was bald on the top of
his head, and wore gold-rimmed spectacles through which his fine dark
eyes beamed down upon his patients with an expression of sympathy that
was in itself as good as a tonic. He asked me a few questions in a
quiet, almost caressing tone of voice, gave the orderly who had me in
charge certain instructions, and then, patting me gently upon the
shoulder, assured me that I should soon be all right again, in a tone of
voice that, quiet as it was, somehow seemed to carry absolute conviction
with it.

As a matter of fact I really did begin to mend practically from that
moment--so rapidly indeed that on the twenty-third day after my
admission the wound in my head had so far healed that the bandages were
discarded--and three weeks later I was discharged into the guardship
cured, the _Europa_ having gone to sea again some time before.

But the guardship was no place for me, weak and shaken as I then was by
my long and serious spell of illness; and although the Admiral might
well, in the press of daily affairs, have been excused had he forgotten
so unimportant a detail as the state of my health, he did not; on the
contrary, he invited me to spend a week at the Pen, to recuperate,
during which his wife, Lady Agnes, was a second mother to me and a
hospital nurse combined. From that moment there was no lack of
invitations for me to go into the country and regain my strength, my
former acquaintances one and all hunting me up and reminding me of
several almost forgotten promises that I would visit them.

As the frigate was not expected to return to Port Royal for at least two
months, and as, although discharged from the hospital, I was as yet by
no means fit for duty, I had not the slightest difficulty in obtaining a
month's leave, which I spent most enjoyably with friends whose estates
were situated in Saint Thomas-in-the-East and on the northern slopes of
the Blue Mountain Range. It is no part of my purpose to enter into a
detailed description of life on a Jamaican sugar plantation, nor will I
attempt to convey to the reader any definite idea of the Jamaicans'
hospitality. Let it suffice to say that I never spent a happier month
anywhere, and that the planters, with all their jollity,
light-heartedness, and love of fun, were the most genial, kindly,
hospitable folk I ever met with, each of them vieing with all the rest
in an amicable