Perhaps our most remarkable patient, however, was a poor fellow who was brought in by a deputation of the men of his village, with a request that we would cure him of the evil eye! If he looked at a crock of milk, it upset; if at a sheep, the wolf got it; if at a child, it was likely enough to tumble into the fire. They were quite fair about the matter, fully recognizing that it was the poor fellow's misfortune, not his fault. Still, he was such a nuisance to all the neighbours, that it was to be hoped that English knowledge would cure him. Unfortunately, we had to own that there was nothing in the British Pharmacopoeia that professes to deal with this form of trouble; and though we had, as a matter of fact, plenty of charms against the evil eye in our possession (invocations of the Archangel Gabriel against "that light and vile daughter of perdition" with power to send it away "into the desolate land, where cocks crow not and foot of beast treads not, there to walk up and down in dry places, seeking rest and finding none") yet we felt on the whole that it would not be proper to use these, and the deputation had to go away disappointed.[145] Once, on a journey, we have known surgical aid demanded in rather menacing fashion. We had halted by a spring, when a party of Kurds, all fully armed of course, turned up from the opposite direction, and demanded of our servant who and what we might be. Hearing that we were English, the leader strode over to us at once, displayed a paralysed arm, and observed, "You have got to cure that." "That is quite beyond our power, we fear," said we, "you must take that to the hospital in Mosul." "Well you know, I think you ought to cure it; because you did it." "We did it? We never set eyes on you before." "Well, if it was not you, it was your Consul; but you English are all one set. He did it when he was shooting at us." Our friend was, as we then understood, one of the gang who had, a few years previously, attacked a British Consul in this neighbourhood.[146] There had been a pretty sharp skirmish, of which this gentleman bore the token in a bullet that had cut the sinews of his right arm. The Consul gained great _kudos_ in the affair; for he not only beat off his assailants, but killed their leader, a man who had the reputation of being "proof" against shot and steel. Such reputations are almost as common in these regions now as they were in the highlands of Scotland in the seventeenth century; but (in spite of the local facilities) the possessors of such immunity are not held to have acquired it by direct compact with the Evil One, like Claverhouse and Dalziel, but to have been born with it in course of nature. Mirza Agha, the Kurd in question, certainly did his best to live up to his character; for though he received three wounds that would each have been fatal to most men (two in the head, and one in the body) he did not die until the fifth day after the battle.