to look after.  At first, of course, I just mooned around, and called myself all sorts of names, honestly considering myself the most stupendous fool ever permitted to exist in freedom from restraint.  I plunged into books and devoured the medical weeklies which the irregular mails of the place brought me, yet this did not entirely suffice, and now I have begun to write.  It may help the time to pass away, and prevent the attacks of mold and rust.  Later on, if things do not shape themselves according to my hopes, these dangers will be of little import.  These sheets may then mildew with the dampness of this land, or fly away to sea with the shrewd breezes that sweep over our coast, for all I shall care.  At any rate they will have served their purpose.

Of course I am trying to swallow my medicine like a little man.  If there is a being I despise it is the fellow who whimpers.  There is little that is admirable in professional pugilism, saving the smile often seen on a fighter’s face after he has just received a particularly hard and crushing blow.  Indeed, that smile is the bruiser’s apology for his life.

Lest it be inferred that I have been fighting, I hasten to declare that it was a rather one-sided contest in which I was defeated, lock, stock and barrel, by a mere slip of a girl towards whom I had only lifted up my hands in supplication.

“We are both very young, John,” she explained to me, with an exasperating, if unconscious, imitation of the doctors she had observed as they announced very disagreeable things to their patients.  “Our lives are practically only beginning.  Until now we have been like the vegetables that are brought up in little wooden boxes.  We are to be taken up and planted in a field, where we are to grow up into something useful.”

“And we shall enjoy a great advantage over the young cabbages and lettuces,” I chimed in.  “We shall have the inestimable privilege of being permitted to select the particular farm or enclosure that pleases us best.”

“Of course,” said Dora Maclennon, cheerfully.

“But I should be ever so glad to have you select for the two of us,” I told her.  “I guarantee to follow you blindly.”

She put her hand on my arm and patted it in the abominably soothing way she has doubtless acquired in the babies’ ward.  In my case it was about as effectual as the traditional red rag to a bull.

“Don’t you dare touch me like that,” I resented.  “I’m quite through with the mumps and measles.  My complaint is one you don’t understand at all.  You are unable to sympathize with me because love, to you, is a mere theoretical thing.  You’ve heard of it, perhaps you are even ready to admit that some people suffer from such an ailment, but you don’t really know anything about it.  It has not been a part of your curriculum.  I’ve been trying to inoculate you with this distemper but it won’t take.”

“I suppose I’m a poor sort of soil for that kind of culture,” she replied, rather wistfully.