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All that day and all the following night Bo lay supinely on the mats, and hardly deigned to touch more than a few morsels of the food I prepared and brought her. The next morning, finding her still of the same mind, I unpacked my flour and other stores, and ordered her, in a rough voice, to get up and make bread. This she did, in a benumbed sort of fashion, dripping tears into the dough and snuffling every time I looked her way. The bread was all right when it was done, though it stuck in my throat when I reflected on the price I had paid to get it, and wondered how I was going to endure two long years of Bo’s society. After a few weeks of this sort of housekeeping I began almost to wish that I were dead, and the sight of the creature became so intolerable to me that I hated to spend an unnecessary hour within my own house. Instead of improving in health, or spirits, or in any other way, Bo grew daily thinner and more woebegone and started a hacking cough, which, she communicated, in some mysterious manner, to the monkey, so that when one was still the other was in paroxysms, giving me, between them, scarce a moment of peace or sleep. Of course I doctored them both from my medicine-chest, and got the thanks I might reasonably have expected: bites and lacerations from the monkey, and from Bo that expression of hers that seemed to say, “Good God! what are you going to do to me now?” I found it too great a strain to persevere with the bread-making, and soon gave up all thought of turning her to any kind of practical account; for what with her tears, her cough, and her passive resistance to doing anything at all, save to titivate the monkey with my comb and brush and wash him with my sponge, I would rather have lived on squid and cocoanuts than anything of her making. Besides, she really seemed to be threatened with galloping consumption; for in addition to her cough, which grew constantly worse, she had other symptoms which alarmed me. Among my stores were a dozen tins of some mushy invalid food,—“Imperial something,” it was called,—with which I manufactured daily messes for my patient, of the consistency (and flavour) of white paint. If she at least failed to thrive on this, it was otherwise with the monkey and the parrot, who fought over her prostrate body for the stuff, and the former would snatch the cup from his mistress’s very mouth.