will recover. For the present he can but prescribe a
purgative and a massage of the arm and spine. On the third visit, he
examines the child's faeces and is happy to have discovered the seat
and cause of the affection. The liver is not performing its function;
and given such weak nerves as the child's, a torpid liver in certain
cases will produce paralysis.

But Khalid is not satisfied with this. He places the doctor's
prescription in his pocket, and goes down to Cairo for a specialist.
He comes, this one, to disturb their peace of mind with his
indecision. It is not infantile paralysis, and he can not yet say
what it is. Khalid meanwhile is poring over medical books on all the
diseases that children are heir to.

On the fifth day the child falls again in convulsions, and the
left arm, too, is paralysed. They take him down to Cairo; and
Medicine, considering the disease of his mother, guesses a third
time--tuberculosis of the spine, it says--and guesses wrong.
Again, considering the strabismus, the obliquity of the mouth, the
palsy in the arms, and the convulsions, we guess closely, but
ominously. Nay, Medicine is positive this time; for a fifth and a
sixth Guesser confirm the others. Here we have a case of cerebral
meningitis. That is certain; that is fatal.

Najib is placed under treatment. They cut his hair, his beautiful flow
of dark hair; rub his scalp with chloroform; keep the hot bottles
around his feet, the ice bag on his head; and give him a spoon of
physic every hour. "Make no noise around the room, and admit no light
into it," further advises the doctor. Thus for two weeks the child
languishes in his mother's arms; and resting from the convulsions and
the coma, he would fix on Khalid the hollow, icy glance of death. No;
the light and intelligence might never revisit those vacant eyes.

Now Shakib comes to suggest a consultation. The great English
physician of Cairo, why not call _him_? It might not be meningitis,
after all, and the child might be helped, might be cured.

The great guesswork Celebrity is called. He examines the patient and
confirms the opinion of his confreres, rather his disciples.

"But the whole tissue," he continues with glib assurance, "is not
affected. The area is local, and to the side of the ear that is sore.
The strabismus being to the right, the affection must be to the left.
And the pus accumulating behind the ear, under the bone, and pressing
on the covering of the brain, p