SICK MAN'S PLIGHT.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXII, Issue 19133, 26 September 1925, Page 2 (Supplement)

SICK MAN'S PLIGHT.

VERY PERILOUS JOURNEY. RIDE IN A JOLTING TRAIN. OVER 800 MILES OF AFRICA. There was taken not long ago to the Rev. Father Hackett, sitting in his study in Spanish Place, London, a cablegram from an outpost in Nigeria. The message told the disturbing news that a young friend, to whom Father Hackett was guardian., was lying in that lonely place, 4000! miles away, with a fractured spine. Nothing could be done for him, and ho prayed to come home. Father Hackett read the cablegram, left his study, left Spanish placo, left London, left England. He spent no more time than was necessary to put the affairs of his church in older, and in five weeks" time he stood by the bed of his friend at Joss, which is 800 miles of forest and river from the West African coast, and where the thermometer is steady at 95 degrees in the shade. Of course tho priest's young friend, who was Mr. Sexton, a clerk of the Bank of West Africa, was glad to see him. He repeated his plea to be taken home, and told what had happened. He had fallen from a window, fracturing his backbone,

and at the tiny hospital of Joss where he had been carried no:hing could be done for him. Perhaps nothing ever could be done for him. But if he could get back to London, where great surgeons are—one, says the narrator of the story, could almost hear the sick man's pleas! Father Hackett heard the plea and hade i Mr. Sexton to be of good courage for he would tako him back. His courage would be needed, for the 800 miles to Lagos was a perilous ordeal. Once it would have been impossible, for bearers would have had to carry his litter all the way; i but now up to and beyond the tin-mines runs a jolting train, and a littlo tinmine wagon on a two-foot track. By these crude methods of locomotion, through three days and nights of the African heat, the injured man was borne back to the coast at Lagos. It was a terrible journey for one in his condition. Every jolt was a wrench to his aching body, and when he could bear the jolting no longer train was stopped to give him a rest. But he got through with the help of his devoted guardian who, with a native, sat night and day holding steady the hammock in which he was slung.

Mr. Sexton was taken aboard a steamer, and though the pain and exertion brought on fever during the voyage he got safely to London and became a patient in a nursing home.