the fire together, and deliberately place his right foot in the glowing mass for a moment, then suddenly withdraw it, stamping on the ground and uttering a long-drawn guttural sound of mingled pain and satisfaction.  This operation he repeated several times.  On my inquiring the meaning of his strange conduct, he only said, ’Me carpenter-make ’em’ (’I am mending my foot’), and then showed me his charred great toe, the nail of which had been torn off by a tea-tree stump, in which it had been caught during the journey, and the pain of which he had borne with stoical composure until the evening, when he had an opportunity of cauterizing the wound in the primitive manner above described.”

And he proceeded on the journey the next day, “as if nothing had happened”—­and walked thirty miles.  It was a strange idea, to keep a surgeon and then do his own surgery.

2.  “A native about twenty-five years of age once applied to me, as a doctor, to extract the wooden barb of a spear, which, during a fight in the bush some four months previously, had entered his chest, just missing the heart, and penetrated the viscera to a considerable depth.  The spear had been cut off, leaving the barb behind, which continued to force its way by muscular action gradually toward the back; and when I examined him I could feel a hard substance between the ribs below the left blade-bone.  I made a deep incision, and with a pair of forceps extracted the barb, which was made, as usual, of hard wood about four inches long and from half an inch to an inch thick.  It was very smooth, and partly digested, so to speak, by the maceration to which it had been exposed during its four months’ journey through the body.  The wound made by the spear had long since healed, leaving only a small cicatrix; and after the operation, which the native bore without flinching, he appeared to suffer no pain.  Indeed, judging from his good state of health, the presence of the foreign matter did not materially annoy him.  He was perfectly well in a few days.”

But No. 3 is my favorite.  Whenever I read it I seem to enjoy all that the patient enjoyed—­whatever it was: 

3.  “Once at King George’s Sound a native presented himself to me with one leg only, and requested me to supply him with a wooden leg.  He had traveled in this maimed state about ninety-six miles, for this purpose.  I examined the limb, which had been severed just below the knee, and found that it had been charred by fire, while about two inches of the partially calcined bone protruded through the flesh.  I at once removed this with the saw; and having made as presentable a stump of it as I could, covered the amputated end of the bone with a surrounding of muscle, and kept the patient a few days under my care to allow the wound to heal.  On inquiring, the native told me that in a fight with other black-fellows a spear had struck his leg and penetrated the bone below the knee.  Finding it