By Word of Mouth (Unabridged)

First published in the Civil and Military Gazette on June 10th 1887, and collected in Plain Tales from the Hills in 1888, and in successive later editions of this collection. It is the last of the thirty-nine stories published in the paper between November 1886 and June 1887. Dumoise, a Civil Surgeon in a small station, marries and lives in happy delight for a year. Then his wife dies of typhoid, the idyll is destroyed, and Dumoise is a broken man. He goes on a walking tour up in the hills, and one evening his bearer rushes to him in terror, saying that he had 'seen the Memsahib'. She has left a message for Dumoise that she will 'meet him at Nuddea', a place he had never heard of. On his return he is posted to Nuddea, twelve hundred miles away in Bengal, to help with a cholera epidemic. Within eleven days he had joined his wife.