Once again Surgeon-Major Pringle felt that professional dignity could best be served by silent contempt, and orders that the offender was, at least, not to loaf about the verandahs. But the fates were against the fiat. In the moonless half of May, driest of all months, a Hindu returning from Hurdwar fell sick, and half-an-hour after the report, Surgeon-Captain Terence O'Brien, going out of the ward with his senior, paused in his cheerful whistling of "Belave me, if all those endearing young charms," to say under his breath, "Cholera, mild type." Now cholera, no matter of what type, has an ugly face when seen for the first time, especially when the face which looks into it, wondering if it means life or death, has youth in its eyes. So in the dark nights the _dhooli_ came into requisition, and with it the torch-bearer, until the green and the blue and yellow wards overflowed into the verandahs, and even the pink _post-mortem_ claimed its final share of boys. Not a large one, however, since, as Terence O'Brien said, "It was wan of those epidemics when ye couldn't rightly say a man had cholera till he died of it." It was bad enough, however, to make the Surgeon-Major, who had never seen one before, set to work when it passed, suddenly as it had come, to cipher out averages, and tabulate treatments, with a view to what is called future guidance. And so, as he confided to his assistant with great complacency, it became clear as daylight that the largest percentage of recoveries, their rapidity, and as a natural corollary the incidence of mildness in the attack itself, seemed in connection with the position of the cots. Those close to the doors, or actually on the verandahs, were the most fortunate, and so he was inclined to believe in the value of currents of fresh air. "Fresh air, is it?" echoed Terence, with an encouraging smile. "Maybe; maybe not. God knows, it may be anything in the wide wurrld, since there's but wan thing you can bet your bottom dollar on in cholera, sir, and that is that ye can't tell anything about it for certain, and that your experience of wan epidemic won't be that of the next." "Neither does your experience, Mr. O'Brien," retorted his senior, sarcastically, "militate against mine being more fortunate. I mean to leave no stone unturned to arrive at reliable _data_ on points which appear to me to have been overlooked. For instance, I shall begin by asking those cases of recovery if they remember anything which seemed at the time to bring them relief, to stimulate in them that vitality which it is so essential to preserve." In pursuance of which plan he went out then and there to the verandah, where a dozen or more lank boys were lounging about listlessly, just beginning to feel that life might soon mean more than a grey duffle dressing-gown and a long chair.