Mr. Harbison came back in a half hour, and I remembered the eggs.  We fished them out of the tea kettle, and they were perfectly hard, but we ate them.

The doctor from the board of health came that morning and vaccinated us.  There was a great deal of excitement, and Aunt Selina was done on the arm.  As she did not affect evening clothes this was entirely natural, but later on in the week, when the wretched things began to take, nobody dared to limp, and Leila made a terrible break by wearing a bandage on her left arm, after telling Aunt Selina that she had been vaccinated on the right.

Chapter VIII.  CORRESPONDENTS’ DEPARTMENT

The following letters were found in the house post box after the lifting of the quarantine, and later were presented to me by their writers, bound in white kid (the letters, not the authors, of course).

From Thomas Harbison, late engineer of bridges, Peruvian trunk lines, South America, to Henry Llewellyn, care of Union Nitrate company, iquique, Chili.

Dear Old Man: 

I think I was fully a week trying to drive out of my mind my last glimpse of you with your sickly grin, pretending to be tickled to pieces that the only white man within two hundred miles of your shack was going on a holiday.  You old bluffer!  I used to hang over the rail of the steamer, on the way up, and see you standing as I left you beside the car with its mule and the Indian driver, and behind you a million miles of soul-destroying pampa.  Never mind, Jack; I sent yesterday by mail steamer the cigarettes, pipes and tobacco, canned goods and poker chips.  Put in some magazines, too, and the collars.  Don’t know about the ties—­guess it won’t matter down there.

Nothing happened on the trip.  One of the engines broke down three days out, and I spent all my time below decks for forty-eight hours.  Chief engineer raving with D.T.’s.  Got the engine fixed in record time, and haven’t got my hands clean yet.  It was bully.

With this I send the papers, which will tell you how I happen to be here, and why I have leisure to write you three days after landing.  If the situation were not so ridiculous, it would be maddening.  Here I am, off for a holiday and congratulating myself that I am foot free and heart free—­yes, my friend, heart free—­here I am, shut in the house of a man I never saw until last night, and wouldn’t care if I never saw again, with a lot of people who never heard of me, who are almost equally vague about South America, who play as hard at bridge as I ever worked at building one (forgive this, won’t you?  The novelty has gone to my head), and who belong to the very class of extravagant, luxury-loving, non-producing parasites (isn’t that what we called them?) that you and I used to revile from our lofty Andean pinnacle.