"But have you no sick here?" I pleaded, "no hospitals or places of need? I am not without experience, I may say that I am even not without attainment, in my profession. Is there no use for it all, in this state of being which I have come to?"
"Sick we have," replied the surgeon, "and hospitals. I myself am much occupied in one of these. But the diseases that men bring here are not of the body. Our patients are chiefly from among the newly arrived, like yourself; they are those who are at odds with the spirit of the place; hence they suffer discomfort."
"They do not harmonize with the environment, I suppose," I interrupted eagerly. I was conscious of a wish to turn the great man's thought from a personal to a scientific direction. It occurred to me with dismay that I might be selected yet to become a patient under this extraordinary system of things. That would be horrible. I could think of nothing worse.
I proceeded to suggest that if anything could be found for me to do, in this superior art of healing, or if, indeed, I could study and perfect myself in it, I was more than willing to learn, or to perform.
"Canst thou heal a sick spirit?" inquired my friend, solemnly. "Canst thou administer holiness to a sinful soul?"
I bowed my head before him; for I had naught to say. Alas, what art had I, in that high science so far above me, that my earth-bound gaze had never reached unto it?
I was not like my friend, who seemed to have carried on the whole range of his great earthly attainments, by force of what I supposed would have to be called his spiritual education. Here in this world of spirits I was an unscientific, uninstructed fellow.
"Give me," I said brokenly, "but the lowliest chance to make an honourable provision for the comfort of my child in your community. I ask no more."
The boy ran chattering to me as I said these words, he sprang and clasped my knees, and clasped my neck, and put his little lips to mine, and rubbed his warm, moist curls across my cheek, and asked me where his mother was. And then he crooned my own name over and over again, and kissed and kissed me, and did stroke me with such pretty excesses of his little tenderness that I took heart and held him fast, and loved him and blessed fate for him, as much as if I had not been a spirit; more than any but a lonely and remorseful spirit could.