DETAILS OF THE OPERATION. 109 



respectable family, about fourteen years old, but 

 small of stature, and presenting even to the most 

 casual glance the stamp of a little gentleman. He 

 had large black eyes, but, unluckily, their expression 

 was very much injured by an inward squint With 

 the light heart of boyhood, however, he seemed in- 

 different to his personal appearance, and came, as 

 he said, because his mother told him to do so. His 

 handsome person, and modest and engaging man- 

 ners, gave us immediately a strong interest in his fa- 

 vour. He was accompanied by the gentleman who 

 had spoken of bringing him, Dr. Bado, a Guati- 

 malian educated in Paris, the oldest and principal 

 physician of Merida, and by several friends of the 

 family, whom we did not know. 



Preparations were commenced immediately. The 

 first movement was to bring out a long table near 

 the window ; then to spread upon it a mattress and 

 pillow, and upon these to spread the boy. Until 

 the actual moment of operating, the precise charac- 

 ter of this new business had not presented itself to 

 my mind, and altogether it opened by no means so 

 favourably as Daguerreotype practice. 



Not aiming to be technical, but desiring to give 

 the reader the benefit of such scraps of learning as 

 I pick up in my travels, modern science has discov- 

 ered that the eye is retained in its orbit by six mus- 

 cles, which pull it up and down, inward and out- 

 ward, and that the undue contraction of either of 

 these muscles produces that obliquity called squint- 



10 



