Thinking black; 22 years without a break in the long grass of Central ...

BLACK MAN = BLACK MANNERS 457
for the said snub-nose is naturally adapted for that pur-
pose. Yet was she a kindly little body, and no doubt it
was out of genuine affection for the sufferer she resented
the terribly business-like look of the table and gleaming
instruments. Just as a peaceful cat dozing in the sun-
light becomes a thing of bristling wickedness and fury
when an enemy comes on the scene, even so Mrs. Hunter
and her dislike of this " death-sleep." But, at last, we
won her round. Result :
a splendidly successful ampu-
tation of the arm by my pioneer wife, the poor hunter
getting the first moment of peaceful calm in two years
when he entered that soft fleecy cloud of chloroform.
Then after three days, all the premature wrinkles of pain
smoothed out of his brow, and once again the old joie
de vivre flamed up in his face—a triumph of antiseptic
surgery. In the coming years, no doubt, when Africa is
a gridiron of railways, smart brick hospitals will grace
these latitudes, but no surgeon will ever boast of such
fame as this " death-sleep " lady and her pioneer
operation.
The scene changes, and here is a whole town in the
terrors of toothache, my dental patients numbering not
ten, twenty, or thirty, but actually more than fifty.
" The
lion of the mouth is roaring " is the tribal phrase for tooth-
ache, and the only remedy known is to attack the tooth
with an axe. That is to say, they bring the tortured
negro up to the axe, then fitting in a plug of hard wood
against the stubborn tooth, the axe crashes against the
plug, sending the tooth, in some cases, down the man's