In the meanwhile my surgical patients were clamouring for operations, more especially those afflicted with cataract. I had opened another dispensary in the city itself, and many poor blind people had come for treatment. It went to one's heart to have to send them away day after day with the same disheartening story. "The instruments have not yet come; until they arrive, nothing can be done." I fear that many commenced to think that the English doctor was a fraud, and that his excuses concerning the instruments resembled those framed by their own "hakims" to hide their own ignorance. At last the boxes actually arrived. They had to be brought by caravan from Bushire (the port in the Persian Gulf) to Kerman, via Shiraz and Yezd, a distance of some eight hundred miles, taking a couple of months. We admitted our first in-patient, a well-known merchant in the city, who had been blind for three years with cataract. The Persian surgeons also operate for this disease, using the old Eastern operation known as "couching." An incision is made into the white of the eyeball (without any anaesthetic), then a thick, blunt probe is worked into the interior of the eye, directed so as to dislocate the lens. If successful, the lens drops back into the posterior chamber of the eye, and the patient "sees," but alas, the vision obtained is, in ninety-eight cases out of a hundred, only temporary! Twenty-four hours later, inflammation of the eye supervenes, and the sight is gone, and the eye lost. Needless to say, the operator obtains his fee either before the operation is done, or during the few hours that his patient is rejoicing in his newly found vision; then if he is wise he disappears from the town, and resumes his practice elsewhere. However, during eight years' practice in the East, and having had the opportunity of examining thousands of eyes, I can remember two cases only where this operation had been done and there had been no subsequent inflammation, but the great majority of eyes are lost. Well, we had our first Kerman cataract patient, and it seemed to us as though the whole future of the little pioneer Medical Mission depended upon the success or failure of that operation.