e
brave._"

Hayes told me that story--modestly and simply as brave men only tell a
tale of their own dauntless daring. And he told me other stories as well
of his strange, wild career; of Gordon of Khartoum, whom he had known,
and of Ward and Burgevine and the Taeping leaders; and how Burgevine
and he quarrelled over a love affair and stood face to face, pistols in
hand, when Ward sprang in between them and said that the woman was his,
and that they were fools to fight over what belonged to neither of them
and what he would gladly be rid of himself.

Peace to his _manes!_ He died--in his sea-boots--from a blow on his big,
bald head, superinduced by his attention to a lady who was "no better
than she ought to have been," even for the islands of the North Pacific.

THE "WHALE CURE"

I once heard a man who for nearly six years had been a martyr to
rheumatism say he would give a thousand pounds to have a cure effected.

"I wish, then, that we were in Australia or New Zealand during the shore
whaling season," remarked a friend of the writer; "I should feel pretty
certain of annexing that thousand pounds." And then he described the
whale cure.

The "cure" is not fiction. It is a fact, so the whalemen assert, and
there are many people at the township of Eden, Twofold Bay, New
South Wales, who, it is vouched, can tell of several cases of chronic
rheumatism that have been absolutely perfectly cured by the treatment
herewith briefly described. How it came to be discovered I do not know,
but it has been known to American whalemen for years.

When a whale is killed and towed ashore (it does not matter whether it
is a "right," humpback, finback, or sperm whale) and while the interior
of the carcase still retains a little warmth, a hole is out through one
side of the body sufficiently large to admit the patient, the lower
part of whose body from the feet to the waist should sink in the whale's
intestines, leaving the head, of course, outside the aperture. The
latter is closed up as closely as possible, otherwise the patient would
not be able to breathe through the volume of ammoniacal gases which
would escape from every opening left uncovered. It is these gases, which
are of an overpowering and atrocious odour, that bring about the cure,
so the whalemen say. Sometimes the patient cannot stand this horrible
bath for more than an hour, and has to be lifted out in a fainting
condition, to undergo a second, third, or perhap