do religion, very severely for a little while. So we carried him
and laid him on a nice white cot in a nice clean room with two beds
in it in the American mission, where they dispense more than royal
hospitality to utter strangers. Will Yerkes had friends there but
that made no difference; Fred was quinined, low-dieted, bathed,
comforted and reproved for swearing by a college-educated nurse,
who liked his principles and disapproved of his professions just
as frankly as if he came from her hometown. (Her name was
Van-something-or-other, and you could lean against the Boston
accent--just a little lonely-sounding, but a very rock of gentle
independence, all that long way from home!)

Meanwhile, we rested. That is to say that, after accepting as much
mission hospitality as was decent, considering that every member of
the staff worked fourteen hours a day and had to make up for attention
shown to us by long hours bitten out of night, we loafed about the
city. And Satan still finds mischief.

We called on Fred in the beginning twice a day, morning and evening,
but cut the visits short for the same reason that Monty did not go
at all: when the fever is on him Fred's feelings toward his own
sex are simply blunt bellicose. When they put another patient in
the spare bed in his room we copied Monty, arguing that one male
at a time for him to quarrel with was plenty.

Monty, being Earl of Montdidier and Kirkudbrightshire, and a privy
councilor, was welcome at the consulate at Mersina, twenty miles
away.
The consul, like Monty, was an army officer, who played good chess,
so that that was no place, either, for Will Yerkes and me. Will