ng till night in a putrid Serbian hospital with all windows closed
requires more than devotion and complete indifference to life. Three
Serbian ladies came to sew pillow cases and sheets every afternoon, and
one of them gave up still more time to teach the patients reading and
writing.

But the town was full, in the summer, of smartly dressed women, and the
village priest never once visited our hospitals. Hearing of the English
missions and their work, peasants began to come from the mountains
around, and the out-patient department became, under Dr. Helen Boyle, a
matter for strenuous mornings.

Many of these poor things had never seen a doctor in their lives. Serbia
even in peace-time had not produced many medical men, and those who
existed had no time to attend the poor gratis.

The percentage of consumptives was enormous. Every family shuts its
windows and doors for the winter and proceeds industriously to spit, and
so the disease spreads.

Diphtheria patients rode and walked often for ten hours and waited in
the courtyard, and people far gone with typhus staggered along in the
blazing spring sun.

One jolly old ragatops with typhus arrived in the afternoon with a
violent temperature, and Jo settled him comfortably in the courtyard
with his head on a sink until Mrs. Berry should come in to see about
taking him into the barracks. He seemed quite happy about himself, but
very worried about his blind beggar brother and his two half-blind
children, whose sight had been ruined by smallpox.

For the latter nothing could be done.

Another time she kept two boys waiting to see if Mrs. Berry could take
them into her typhus barracks. One had scarlet fever, and the other was
a young starving clerk in a galloping consumption, thirty-six hours from
his home.

Afraid to raise their hopes, and not knowing if there would be room for
them, Jo told them that they were to have some very strong medicine that
could only be administered two hours after a dose of hot milk and
biscuit (the medicine was only bovril). By this time Mrs. Berry arrived
and managed to squeeze the boys in.

However, we were told to clear the hospitals, for the wounded were
expected.

"What could be done with the scarlet fever boy?" At last an idea came:
"The Mortuary," built by the Horse Show Judge with such joy. The
mortuary that we had all gone to admire as a work of art.

But the scarlet fever boy did not seem to see it that way, for in the
night