senior medical officer, an experienced surgeon, decided it was too dangerous to attempt to operate on the boy under those conditions and at that time.
He was bandaged and kept in bed until the convoy reached its destination. Then he was taken off by a British ship and sent to a British naval hospital for the operation. On the cruiser's next trip the sailor was picked up and brought home to finish his convalescence in a naval hospital in the United States.
Sailors show as many varieties of temperament as any other group of men. There are tough customers whose constitutions seem impervious to any injury. Such was the oiler who finally presented himself at sick bay and asked for a cure for chronic constipation.
"How is your appetite?" asked the medical officer.
"Oh, I don't let it affect my eating none," the man assured him.
"Well," said the doctor, "my advice to you is to go on eating plenty of food. In due course of nature you're bound to defecate or bust!"
"That's what I thought myself, Doctor," the sailor agreed.
Then there are the anxious natures, like the apprentice seaman, second class, who recited to the doctor a long list of symptoms, concluding with morning sickness and an inordinate desire for certain foods. "What do you think can be the matter with me, Doctor?" he inquired.
"If you hadn't been examined at the recruiting office and found a male, I'd say you had a slight touch of pregnancy," was the doctor's dry comment. "Are you married?"
"Not exactly, sir," was the reply. "But I've got a girl friend in Brooklyn."
Every ship's crew has its quota of gold-brickers who try to work the doctor for a sick badge which automatically lets them off duty as long as they wear it. There is a continual contest between their ingenuity in devising symptoms and your skill in detecting it. Eventually you acquire a nose for malingerers and invent ways of
