Operating upon others was easy enough; it was when one had to draw one’s own tooth--as I had to do one Sabbath morning--that the difficulty came in. I had had a night of excruciating toothache, and in the morning was half beside myself with the pain. I was due that morning to preach at one of the outlying churches. I knew the people would be waiting for me, but while in such agony I did not feel fit to go. In my desperation I determined to have the offending tooth out. I wanted my wife to draw it, but she said she could not. ‘Fix the forceps on it, then,’ I said, ‘and I will draw it myself.’ She did as requested. I waited a little, then I wrenched the tooth out, flung the forceps from me, danced through the hut for a few minutes in agony, then all was over, and I mounted my palanquin, and went off to my preaching. Fortunately it was an upper tooth, otherwise I could not have succeeded. Just after we had settled at Fìhàonana, a boy was brought to me with his hand seemingly crushed to a pulp. At the entrance of the villages in the country a circular block of granite used to be rolled in between four upright pillars of the same material during the night to block the entrance. Sitting swinging upon one of these, he had got his hand crushed between the circular block and one of the pillars. When first I saw it I thought the whole hand was bruised to a jelly; but after soaking it for some time in tepid water I found that it was not nearly so bad as I had feared. The first joint of the middle finger, however, had been so crushed that I deemed it best to amputate it. I laid the lad down on a mat at my own door, with a crowd of natives standing round, administered chloroform, took my knife and performed the operation. The hand was dressed and done up before consciousness quite returned. After all was over his friends asked the lad whether he had felt the _vazàha_ (white man) cutting him. ‘No,’ he answered. ‘Did he cut me?’ he asked. ‘Yes,’ they said, ‘he cut off the point of your finger.’ ‘I never felt him,’ he replied. His confession caused the deepest wonder. ‘What magicians these white men are!’ the people said; ‘they just put a rag with a few drops of eau-de-Cologne’ (eau-de-Cologne was the only liquid with an odour with which the Malagasy were acquainted) ‘to a boy’s nostrils, and off he goes to sleep, and they can cut him without his knowing anything about it.’ Of course an exaggerated account of this simple operation was spread abroad, and gave rise to an exaggerated estimate of my own powers and that of my medicine, which stood me in good stead for many years; although I only discovered this during the rising in 1897.