CORRESPONDENCE. 
59 
diploma, but if he had may the Lord in his infinite mercy 
forgive the mill that gave it to him. Anyhow, he drew a 
salary, and had full swing to perpetrate his knowledge on 
several hundred unsuspecting quadrupeds belonging to your 
Uncle Sainivil. He was equal to the occasion, however, and 
has left a trail behind blazed with an originality and brilliancy 
that can never be obscured. The department in which he 
belonged employed several veterinary surgeons (I’m not using 
caps here) during the last scrap. A few were all right, some of 
them fair to middling, a number decidedly short, and not a few 
who were “rank.” They were not all heroes, and they were 
not out in search of the holy Grail, by any manner of means, 
but more interested in chasing the dollar of the country around 
the barbed wire fence of an unsanitary corral, while a practice 
of thousands of dollars a year at home went to the eternal 
bow-wows. He was one of them, in fact, the king bee of the 
bunch. In the classic language of Chimmey Fadden, he was 
a “corker,” and could give aces and spades to Pasteurs, Dav- 
aines, and Kochs, and then beat them at their own game. Armed 
with an ordinary twenty-dollar microscope, accompanied with a 
gall immersion lens, and given plenty of room and a chance to 
catch his breath occasionally, he could raise more kinds of what 
used to be called hell before hades was discovered, inside the 
space of about two minutes, than any one or two men I have 
ever heard tell of. He was happy in his power, however. 
I think it was George Eliot who said (or words to that 
effect) that the two things necessary to happiness are a good 
digestion and a large amount of gall, and, as he was far from 
being a dyspeptic, he certainly must be the happiest individual 
in this “ vale of tears,” as the church people put it. 
While in the throes of an examination, some few moons 
since, to determine whether I was a “ first-class vet,” or but an 
ordinary horse doctor, glanders was reported to have shown 
itself in a certain troop of the regiment. He was sent out. and, 
like Caesar, he came, he saw, and conquered. He jumped out 
of the chariot in which he arrived, injected a quantity of 
mallein, took the temperature immediately after, scraped some 
of the nasal discharge on to a slide, slipped it into a microscope 
he had with him, stood the apparatus on the fence, cast his 
eagle eye along the sights in the manner of Davy Crockett, or 
Leather Stocking, and awaited results. Of course, under con¬ 
ditions such as these, something must happen, or the cosmos 
go smash. He roared “glanders” to an awe-struck audience of 
