window seemed to me like an altar on which I had to
offer up my son. There were basins of disinfectants and towels
conveniently about, the operator came, took out his array of scalpels
and forceps and little sponges from the black bag he carried, put them
ready for his hand, and then covered them from your sight with a white
cloth, and I brought you down in my arms, wrapped in a blanket, from
your bedroom to the anaesthetist. You were beautifully trustful and
submissive and unafraid. I stood by you until the chloroform had done
its work, and then left you there, lest my presence should in the
slightest degree embarrass the surgeon. The anaesthetic had taken all the
color out of your face, and you looked pinched and shrunken and greenish
and very small and pitiful. I went into the drawing-room and stood there
with your mother and made conversation. I cannot recall what we said, I
think it was about the moorland to which we were going for your
convalescence. Indeed, we were but the ghosts of ourselves; all our
substance seemed listening, listening to the little sounds that came to
us from the study.

Then after long ages there was a going to and fro of feet, a bump, the
opening of a door, and our own doctor came into the room rubbing his
hands together and doing nothing to conceal his profound relief.
"Admirable," he said, "altogether successful." I went up to you and saw
a tumbled little person in the bed, still heavily insensible and moaning
slightly. By the table were bloody towels, and in a shallow glass tray
was a small object like a damaged piece of earthworm. "Not a bit too
soon," said the surgeon, holding this up in his forceps for my
inspection. "It's on the very verge of perforation." I affected a
detached and scientific interest, but the prevailing impression in my
mind was that this was a fragment from very nearly the centre of your
being.

He took it away with him, I know not whither. Perhaps it is now in
spirits in a specimen jar, an example to all medical students of what to
avoid in an appendix; perhaps it was stained and frozen, and
microtomized into transparent sections as they do such things, and
mounted on glass slips and distributed about the world for curious
histologists to wreak their eyes upon. For a time you lay uneasily still
and then woke up to pain. Even then you got a fresh purchase on my
heart. It has always been our custom to discourage weeping and outcries,
and you did not forget your tr