certain
of their fellow-citizens, who pay them toll on each booty? Whatever
you pay this ancient for stealing your life blood, of that the landlord
takes his third for betraying you to him. Nay, more, as soon as ever
your blood goes down the stair in that basin there, the landlord will
see it or smell it, and send swiftly to his undertaker and get his third
out of that job. For if he waited till the doctor got downstairs, the
doctor would be beforehand and bespeak his undertaker, and then he would
get the black thirds. Say I sooth, old Rouge et Noir? dites!"

"Denys, Denys, who taught you to think so ill of man?"

"Mine eyes, that are not to be gulled by what men say, seeing this many
a year what they do, in all the lands I travel."

The doctor with some address made use of these last words to escape
the personal question. "I too have eyes as well as thou, and go not by
tradition only, but by what I have seen, and not only seen, but done.
I have healed as many men by bleeding as that interloping Arabist has
killed for want of it. 'Twas but t'other day I healed one threatened
with leprosy; I but bled him at the tip of the nose. I cured last year
a quartan ague: how? bled its forefinger. Our cure lost his memory. I
brought it him back on the point of my lance; I bled him behind the
ear. I bled a dolt of a boy, and now he is the only one who can tell his
right hand from his left in a whole family of idiots. When the plague
was here years ago, no sham plague, such as empyrics proclaim every six
years or so, but the good honest Byzantine pest, I blooded an alderman
freely, and cauterized the symptomatic buboes, and so pulled him out
of the grave; whereas our then chirurgeon, a most pernicious Arabist,
caught it himself, and died of it, aha, calling on Rhazes, Avicenna,
and Mahound, who, could they have come, had all perished as miserably as
himself."

"Oh, my poor ears," sighed Gerard.

"And am I fallen so low that one of your presence and speech rejects my
art and listens to a rude soldier, so far behind even his own miserable
trade as to bear an arbalest, a worn-out invention, that German
children shoot at pigeons with, but German soldiers mock at since ever
arquebusses came and put them down?"

"You foul-mouthed old charlatan," cried Denys, "the arbalest is
shouldered by taller men than ever stood in Rhenish hose, and even now
it kills as many more than your noisy, stinking arquebus, as the lancet
does than all ou