This Dr. Hirsch was a terrible man. His head was stuffed full of all sorts of Utopian ideas, of impracticable theories, and notions absolutely without method. His studies had been too desultory to amount to anything. He had mastered a few Latin phrases, and covered his real ignorance by a smattering of the science of medicine as practised among the Indians and the Chinese. He even had a strong leaning toward the magic arts, and when a human life was intrusted to his care he took that opportunity to try some experiments. Madame Moronval was inclined to call in another physician, but the principal, less compassionate, and unwilling to incur the additional expense, determined to leave the case solely in the hands of Dr. Hirsch. Wishing to have no interference, this singular physician pretended that the disease was contagious, and ordered Mâdou’s bed to be placed at the end of the garden in an old hot-house. For a week he tried on his little victim every drug he had ever heard of, the child making no more resistance than a sick dog would have done. When the doctor, armed with his bottles and his powders, entered the hot-house, the “children of the sun,” to whose minds a physician was always more or less of a magician, gathered about the door and listened, saying to each other in awed tones, “What is he going to do now to Mâdou?” But the doctor locked the door, and peremptorily ordered the children from its vicinity, telling them that they would be ill too, that Mâdou’s illness was contagious; and this last idea added additional mystery to that corner of the garden. Jack, nevertheless, desired to see his friend so much that he alone of all the boys would have gladly passed the threshold, had it not been too closely guarded. One day, however, he seized an occasion when the doctor had gone in search of some forgotten drug, and crept softly into the improvised infirmary. It was one of those half rustic buildings which are used as a shelter for rakes and hoes, or even to house some tender plants. Close by the side of Mâdou’s iron bed, in the corner, was a pile of earthen flowerpots; a broken trellis, some panes of glass, and a bundle of dried roots, completed the dismal picture; and in the chimney, as if for the protection of some fragile tropical plant, flickered a tiny fire. Mâdou was not asleep. His poor little thin face had still the same expression of absolute indifference. His black hands, tightly clenched, lay on the outside of the bedclothes. There was a look of a sick animal in his whole attitude, and in the manner in which he turned his face toward the wall, as if an invisible road was open to his eyes through the white stones, and every chink in the wall had become a brilliant outlook toward a country known to him alone. Jack whispered, “It is I, Mâdou,—little Jack.”