In China and some other places one has a fever getting acclimated.
One in Shanghai left man pretty weak when the usual plague of boils
broke out. Then there was less rest for the wicked than ever, and he
balanced himself on a boil and thought about Job. The doctor says that
the man is better and that this is a crisis he wanted (man wishes
doctor had it). But man does get well after many dawns, watching the
bats come home to roost in the round tiles used in the roofs here.
Then cats come along the edge and reaching paws over extract the bats
and put them away and go after more. The man thinks he's glad he's not
a bat and goes to sleep and wakes up better and forgets about it till
some day years after he dreams dreams.
Talking of fevers, when the oil wells started in Canada it was rather
rough living. The water to drink very bad, and so on. At all events
we got a bad mixture of typhoid and smallpox and not much doctor. So
a great many died. One of us had it and another nursed him till he
got to his bed and forgot everything except sticking a favorite pin
in a rafter overhead. The other was better and had sent a line to
friends a hundred miles away; they came, and the two men were put on
their mattresses on the bottom of a wagon and so over eighteen miles
of corduroy road (which is trees laid alongside one another) and
into the baggage car of a railroad train. The war was going on and
sympathetic passengers came in: "Oh, poor fellows! where were they
wounded?" Our friends said: "not wounded at all; typhoid," and the car
was empty. Took us nine weeks to get around. H. McC. carried one along
the railway platform and if you have ever been carried through a lot
of people when you have sense enough to know that you are grown up and
want to hit some one if you had the strength, you know what one felt
like--Wonder who got that pin!
[Illustration: Baggage.]
[Illustration: A Night on the "Grimsel" Pass--Switzerland]