he bleeding he had plunged his hand into a
flour barrel and then tied it up in a bag, and as a result the wounded
arm was poisoned way up above the elbow. He preferred death to losing
his right arm. Day and night for weeks our nurse tended him, as he
hovered between life and death with general blood poisoning. Slowly
his fine constitution brought him through, and at last a secondary
operation for repair became possible. We took chances on bone-grafting
to form a hand; and he was left with a flipper like a seal's, able,
however, to oppose one long index finger and "nip a line" when he
fished. But there was no skin for it. So Dr. Beattie and I shared the
honours of supplying some. Pat--for that was his name--has been a
veritable apostle of the hospital ever since, and has undoubtedly been
the means of enabling others to risk the danger of our suspected
proselytizing. For though he had English Episcopal skin on the palm of
his hand and Scotch Presbyterian skin on the back, the rest of him
still remained a devout Roman Catholic.

Another somewhat parallel case occurred the following year, when a
dear old Catholic lady was hauled fifty miles over the snow by her two
stalwart sons, to have her leg removed for tubercular disease of the
ankle. She did exceedingly well, and the only puzzle which we could
not solve was where to raise the necessary hundred dollars for a new
leg--for her disposition, even more than her necessity, compelled her
to move about. While lecturing that winter in America, I asked friends
to donate to me any of their old legs which they no longer needed, and
soon I found myself the happy possessor of two good wooden limbs, one
of which exactly suited my requirements. A departed Methodist had left
it, and the wife's clergyman, a Congregationalist, had handed it to
me, an Episcopalian, and I had the joy of seeing it a real blessing to
as good a Roman Catholic as I know. As the priest says, there is now
at least one Protestant leg established in his parish.

We once reached a house at midnight, found a boy with a broken thigh,
and had to begin work by thawing out frozen board in order to plane
it for splints, then pad and fix it, and finally give chloroform on
the kitchen table. On another occasion we had to knock down a
partition in a tiny cottage, make a full-length wooden bath, pitching
the seams to make it water-tight, in order to treat a severe
cellulitis. Now it would be a maternity case, now a dental o