cetera, as propose returning via America, and fear interviewers. Japan
jolly place." Then follows some private matter which I need not insert.
Oliver is always extravagant where cablegrams are concerned.

I suppose that before entering on this narration, for the reader's
benefit I had better give some short description of myself.

My name is Richard Adams, and I am the son of a Cumberland yeoman who
married a Welshwoman. Therefore I have Celtic blood in my veins, which
perhaps accounts for my love of roving and other things. I am now an old
man, near the end of my course, I suppose; at any rate, I was sixty-five
last birthday. This is my appearance as I see it in the glass before
me: tall, spare (I don't weigh more than a hundred and forty pounds--the
desert has any superfluous flesh that I ever owned, my lot having been,
like Falstaff, to lard the lean earth, but in a hot climate); my eyes
are brown, my face is long, and I wear a pointed white beard, which
matches the white hair above.

Truth compels me to add that my general appearance, as seen in that
glass which will not lie, reminds me of that of a rather aged goat;
indeed, to be frank, by the natives among whom I have sojourned, and
especially among the Khalifa's people when I was a prisoner there, I
have often been called the White Goat.

Of my very commonplace outward self let this suffice. As for my record,
I am a doctor of the old school. Think of it! When I was a student at
Bart.'s the antiseptic treatment was quite a new thing, and administered
when at all, by help of a kind of engine on wheels, out of which
disinfectants were dispensed with a pump, much as the advanced gardener
sprays a greenhouse to-day.