common herd of them, tho they have graduated in due
form and order, are likely to run out the length of their tether
without knowing their right hand from their left."

I thanked the doctor for having so speedily enabled me to serve as his
deputy; and by way of acknowledging his goodness, promised to follow
his system to the end of my career, with a magnanimous indifference
about the aphorisms of Hippocrates. But that engagement was not to be
taken to the letter. This tender attachment to water went against the
grain, and I had a scheme for drinking wine every day snugly among the
patients. I left off wearing my own suit a second time, to take up one
of my master's and look like an experienced practitioner. After which
I brought my medical theories into play, leaving those it might
concern to look to the event. I began on an alguazil in a pleurisy; he
was condemned to be bled with the utmost rigor of the law, at the same
time that the system was to be replenished copiously with water. Next
I made a lodgment in the veins of a gouty pastry-cook, who roared like
a lion by reason of gouty spasms. I stood on no more ceremony with
his blood than with that of the alguazil, and laid no restriction on
his taste for simple liquids. My prescriptions brought me in twelve
rials: an incident so auspicious in my professional career, that I
only wished for the plagues of Egypt on all the hale subjects of
Valladolid....

II

AS AN ARCHBISHOP'S FAVORITE[33]

I had been after dinner to get together my baggage, and take my horse
from the inn where I had put up; and afterward returned to supper at
the archbishop's palace, where a neatly furnished room was got ready
for me, and such a bed as was more likely to pamper than to mortify
the flesh. The day following his Grace sent for me quite as soon as I
was ready to go to him. It was to give me a homily to transcribe. He
made a point of having it copied with all possible accuracy. It was
done to please him; for I omitted neither accent, nor comma, nor the
minutest tittle of all he had marked down. His satisfaction at
observing this was heightened by its being unexpected. "Eternal
Father!" exclaimed he in a holy rapture, when he had glanced his eye
over all the folios of my copy, "was ever anything seen so correct?
You are too good a transcriber not to have some little smattering of
the grammarian. Now tell me with the freedom of a friend: in writing
it over, have you been struck