sat up brown and gaunt with a white bandage set rakishly on the forehead.  Suddenly my interesting invalid shot out an arm thin like a tentacle and clawed my shoulder.  “Only my eyes were good enough to see.  I am famous for my eyesight.  That’s why they called me, I expect.  None of them was quick enough to see her go, but they saw that she was gone right enough, and sang out together—­like this.” . . .  A wolfish howl searched the very recesses of my soul.  “Oh! make ’im dry up,” whined the accident case irritably.  “You don’t believe me, I suppose,” went on the other, with an air of ineffable conceit.  “I tell you there are no such eyes as mine this side of the Persian Gulf.  Look under the bed.”

’Of course I stooped instantly.  I defy anybody not to have done so.  “What can you see?” he asked.  “Nothing,” I said, feeling awfully ashamed of myself.  He scrutinised my face with wild and withering contempt.  “Just so,” he said, “but if I were to look I could see—­there’s no eyes like mine, I tell you.”  Again he clawed, pulling at me downwards in his eagerness to relieve himself by a confidential communication.  “Millions of pink toads.  There’s no eyes like mine.  Millions of pink toads.  It’s worse than seeing a ship sink.  I could look at sinking ships and smoke my pipe all day long.  Why don’t they give me back my pipe?  I would get a smoke while I watched these toads.  The ship was full of them.  They’ve got to be watched, you know.”  He winked facetiously.  The perspiration dripped on him off my head, my drill coat clung to my wet back:  the afternoon breeze swept impetuously over the row of bedsteads, the stiff folds of curtains stirred perpendicularly, rattling on brass rods, the covers of empty beds blew about noiselessly near the bare floor all along the line, and I shivered to the very marrow.  The soft wind of the tropics played in that naked ward as bleak as a winter’s gale in an old barn at home.  “Don’t you let him start his hollering, mister,” hailed from afar the accident case in a distressed angry shout that came ringing between the walls like a quavering call down a tunnel.  The clawing hand hauled at my shoulder; he leered at me knowingly.  “The ship was full of them, you know, and we had to clear out on the strict Q.T.,” he whispered with extreme rapidity.  “All pink.  All pink—­as big as mastiffs, with an eye on the top of the head and claws all round their ugly mouths.  Ough!  Ough!” Quick jerks as of galvanic shocks disclosed under the flat coverlet the outlines of meagre and agitated legs; he let go my shoulder and reached after something in the air; his body trembled tensely like a released harp-string; and while I looked down, the spectral horror in him broke through his glassy gaze.  Instantly his face of an old soldier, with its noble and calm outlines, became decomposed before my eyes by the corruption of stealthy cunning, of an abominable caution and of desperate fear.  He restrained a cry—­“Ssh! what are they doing now