efullest man I ever had to cook for. Well, we comes up
here on our way to the Koaka Velt on some kind of scientific trip er
other I dunno, and it didn't matter as long as I was paid and the two
prospectors they brings in gold, and tin, and copper, and all sorts of
muck, and the perfesser was busy 'blow-piping' and 'classifying' and
what not, and every day he gets more 'centrick. Then he gets sick only
a bit of fever, but it laid him out bad for a time: and he couldn't
shave, and he couldn't bath, and that hurt him wuss'n the fever. We was
here, then; jist in this same camp. And when he got well enough to talk
again I took him his cawfee one morning, and sees him a-looking at
himself in a little glass: and he looked fair frightened! He'd got a
week's bristles on, and they was grey, o' course he weren't no chicken,
anyway! And he says to me pitiful like 'Blake, I surely don't look as
old as all that?'

"'You've bin ill, perfesser,' I says, 'and it don't make a man look
younger. You'll be all right when you've had a bath there's plenty o'
water now.'

"Well, I could see 'e weren't satisfied, because he gives a bit of a
groan, and looks at hisself in the glass agin. But a day or two
arterwards he was well enough to get up, and when he sees Erongo for
the fust time, with the water a-pouring down that big fall, he
brightens up at once.

"'Just the very place the very place. Who knows but it may be true?
Never to be old! . . . Never to be old!' I hears him a-saying, over and
over again; but nat'rally, I on'y thought he was a bit off his napper,
same as half these 'ere perfessers is, wot think they know heverythink!
Anyhow, as soon as ever he was able, oft he goes and bathes in the
stream, farther up, a goodish way from the camp, and a power o' good it
seemed to do him, for he comes back a-looking ten years younger. Next
day he sends the two prospectors out fer a long trip and then he calls
me.

"'Jim,' says he, ''ow do you think I look?'

"'Look?' I says for I was fair mazed at the look of him, 'why ten years
younger than ever I seed yer!'

"'Just so,' says 'e. . . . 'It's true then!'

"'Wot's true,' I says.

"'The water of life,' says he; 'I have searched for it fer years!'

"'Take some quinine,' says I, 'and back yer goes to bed,' for I'd seen
fever patients that way afore.

"'You don't know heverythink, Blake,' he says he 'ad a nasty way o'
using that there expression; 'it isn't fever it's joy. For if the
stre