It may
seem a strange jumble of description and sentiment, jocularity and
seriousness. During the greater part of each day I enjoyed perfect rest,
smoking and thinking--sometimes soberly, often I fear idly--and for mere
occupation sake, my thoughts were written as they arose. My mind as
influenced by scene or incident, is fully exposed in these pages, and
while I have concealed nothing, neither have I added to that which I
originally indited. I am necessarily, and indeed intentionally
egotistical, because I write for those who will chiefly value a personal
narrative. Still, I am not ashamed if others see my book, although I
would deprecate their criticism by begging them to remember that I only
offer it for the perusal of those near and dear to me.
INTRODUCTION.
In the early morning of Midsummer's-day, 1868, I might have been seen
slowly wending my way towards the office of the Deputy Inspector General
of Hospitals, at Peshawur--for the purpose of appearing before the
standing Medical Committee of the station, and having an enquiry made
concerning the state of my health. A Dooley followed me lest my strength
should prove inadequate to the task of walking a quarter of a mile. But
let me make my description as short as the Committee did their enquiry.
My face, as white as the clothes I wore, told more than my words could,
and I was hardly required to recount how that one burning May-day I was
called at noon to visit a sick woman, and that while all other Europeans
were in their closed and darkened bungalows with punkahs swinging, and
thermautidotes blowing cool breezes, I went forth alone on my medical
mission to encounter the fierce gaze of the baneful sun, and was
overpowered by its fiery influence, or how that I laid a weary month on
the sick bed, tormented by day with a never ceasing headache, and by
night with a terrible dread, worse than any pain, or to conclude, how
the deadly climate of that notoriously evil station afforded me no
prospect of improvement.
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