That was it.  A little nearer.  Whereas if we had only had a little more wind, only a very little more, we might, we should, have been abreast of Liant by this time and increasing our distance from that contaminated shore.  And it was not only the distance.  It seemed to me that a stronger breeze would have blown away the contamination which clung to the ship.  It obviously did cling to the ship.  Two men.  One burning, one shivering.  I felt a distinct reluctance to go and look at them.  What was the good?  Poison is poison.  Tropical fever is tropical fever.  But that it should have stretched its claw after us over the sea seemed to me an extraordinary and unfair license.  I could hardly believe that it could be anything worse than the last desperate pluck of the evil from which we were escaping into the clean breath of the sea.  If only that breath had been a little stronger.  However, there was the quinine against the fever.  I went into the spare cabin where the medicine chest was kept to prepare two doses.  I opened it full of faith as a man opens a miraculous shrine.  The upper part was inhabited by a collection of bottles, all square-shouldered and as like each other as peas.  Under that orderly array there were two drawers, stuffed as full of things as one could imagine—­paper packages, bandages, cardboard boxes officially labelled.  The lower of the two, in one of its compartments, contained our provision of quinine.

There were five bottles, all round and all of a size.  One was about a third full.  The other four remained still wrapped up in paper and sealed.  But I did not expect to see an envelope lying on top of them.  A square envelope, belonging, in fact, to the ship’s stationery.

It lay so that I could see it was not closed down, and on picking it up and turning it over I perceived that it was addressed to myself.  It contained a half-sheet of notepaper, which I unfolded with a queer sense of dealing with the uncanny, but without any excitement as people meet and do extraordinary things in a dream.

“My dear Captain,” it began, but I ran to the signature.  The writer was the doctor.  The date was that of the day on which, returning from my visit to Mr. Burns in the hospital, I had found the excellent doctor waiting for me in the cabin; and when he told me that he had been putting in time inspecting the medicine chest for me.  How bizarre!  While expecting me to come in at any moment he had been amusing himself by writing me a letter, and then as I came in had hastened to stuff it into the medicine-chest drawer.  A rather incredible proceeding.  I turned to the text in wonder.

In a large, hurried, but legible hand the good, sympathetic man for some reason, either of kindness or more likely impelled by the irresistible desire to express his opinion, with which he didn’t want to damp my hopes before, was warning me not to put my trust in the beneficial effects of a change from land to sea.  “I didn’t want to add to your worries by discouraging your hopes,” he wrote.  “I am afraid that, medically speaking, the end of your troubles is not yet.”  In short, he expected me to have to fight a probable return of tropical illness.  Fortunately I had a good provision of quinine.  I should put my trust in that, and administer it steadily, when the ship’s health would certainly improve.