"It is the first time since the dawn-days of Creation that
a Voice has gone crashing through space with such
placid and complacent confidence and command."



CHAPTER I
VIENNA 1899.

This last summer, when I was on my way back to Vienna from the
Appetite-Cure in the mountains, I fell over a cliff in the twilight, and
broke some arms and legs and one thing or another, and by good luck was
found by some peasants who had lost an ass, and they carried me to the
nearest habitation, which was one of those large, low, thatch-roofed
farm-houses, with apartments in the garret for the family, and a cunning
little porch under the deep gable decorated with boxes of bright colored
flowers and cats; on the ground floor a large and light sitting-room,
separated from the milch-cattle apartment by a partition; and in the
front yard rose stately and fine the wealth and pride of the house, the
manure-pile. That sentence is Germanic, and shows that I am acquiring
that sort of mastery of the art and spirit of the language which enables
a man to travel all day in one sentence without changing cars.

There was a village a mile away, and a horse doctor lived there, but
there was no surgeon. It seemed a bad outlook; mine was distinctly a
surgery case. Then it was remembered that a lady from Boston was
summering in that village, and she was a Christian Science doctor and
could cure anything. So she was sent for. It was night by this time,
and she could not conveniently come, but sent word that it was no matter,
there was no hurry, she would give me "absent treatment" now, and come