"It was a kind of fever he caught while duck-snaring in the lagoon. He'd start off there for a long day with his dog, the two practising cleverness at the sport. I always felt somehow that, when his grief came, it would come through the dog. . . . Well, he took a fever which I couldn't well diagnose, to say whether it was rheumatic or malarial. It ran to sweats and it ran to dry skin with shivering-fits, the deuce of a temperature, and wild delirium. "I nursed him, of course, and doctored him, keeping the fever at bay as well as I could with decoctions of bark--quassia for the most part--and fresh juice of limes. But it was the vigour of his frame that pulled him through--as I believe all the skill in London could not have availed to do in the days of his prosperity when he was fat and fleshy. Hard life on the island had thinned him down and tautened and toughened him so that I wondered sometimes, washing his body, if this was indeed the man with whom I had vowed my quarrel. "His ravings in delirium, however, left no doubt on that score! I tell you I had to listen to some fairly obscene descriptions of myself and his feelings for me--all in the best Houndsditch. . . . Yet here again was a queer thing--again and again this gutter-flow would check itself, drop its Cockney as if down a sink, and, bubbling up again, start flowing to the language of an educated man. . . . The first time this happened it gave me a shock, less the abruptness of the break than by its sudden assault upon my memory. All insensibly, and unmarked by me, Farrell's accent and way of speech had been nearing those of decent folk. They were by no means perfect, but they had amazingly improved. . . . Now, when his delirium plunged him back to Houndsditch, though it gave me a jerk, I could account for it as reversion to an old habit that had been put off before ever we met. What beat me was, that his second style, accent and choice of words--though still fluent in cursing--far surpassed in purity any speech I had heard from him in health. "And there was something else about it. . . . While the gutter ran Houndsditch, the man was a cur, cowering and yelping out terror under strokes of a whip-lash. When it shifted accent, he lost all this and started to _threaten_. Something like this it would run: 'Gawd! Oh, Gawd, he's after me again. . . . See his rosy eyes follerin' like rosy naphthas. . . . Oh, Gawd, hide me from this blighter. . . . Look here, damn you! I'll trouble you to know who's master here. You will halt where you are, you Foe, and not wag a tail until I give you leave. That's better! Now, if you will kindly state your business at that distance I'll state mine. . . . Is that all? Quite so: and now you'll listen to me, and maybe reconsider yourself . . .' That, or something like that, is the way it would go.