Mr. Esau 151 



ble symbols. An air-gun that, perhaps, a fond 

 mother thought would make her future President 

 manly in his tender years, had been the weapon 

 used in the fracture of a wing, and this fracture 

 meant the robbing of the organ-loft of a cathedral 

 tree of a sweet and mysterious musician, intimate 

 friend of Aeolian Harpists and rival of Apollo. 



Victory and defeat are often not more than a 

 minute apart and one has a most unaccountable 

 trick of usurping the place of the other. A small 

 boy thrilled with victory as he beheld his ani- 

 mated target falling fluttering through the limbs 

 of the tree earthward, but when within reach of 

 his hand the splash of red on the breast was mis- 

 taken for blood, and overwhelmed with remorse 

 and shame, he took to his heels ; and it was quite 

 another boy, who knew nothing of the catastrophe, 

 that picked up the wounded bird by the roadside 

 and carried it to his teacher at school and she, figu- 

 ratively speaking, put a red cross upon him, and 

 had the patient rushed to my hospital for neces- 

 sary surgery. 



Like his great prototype, my Mr. Esau was a 

 cunning hunter and a creature of the field and in 

 addition, I found him to be one of my most im- 

 possible patients fighting each and every measure 

 attempted for his betterment, with the obstinacy 

 of a martyr and the long-suffering of a saint. The 

 difficulty was not in applying the starched bandage 



