ok the youth there and let him join in the village games, and
by degrees made him into a vinedresser. But if at any time it chanced that
William's services were also wanted at the tailor's shop, his master would
force him to return thereto in the evening (for the farm was two miles
distant), and sit sewing all the night. Besides this the boy would go
dancing with the villagers, and in the course of their merry-making he
fell in love with a girl. While I was living at Milan he was taken with
fever, and came to me; but, for various reasons, I did not give proper
attention to him, first, because he himself made light of his ailment;
second, because I knew not that his sickness had been brought on by
excessive toil and exposure to the sun; and third, because, when he had
been seized with a similar distemper on two or three occasions before
this, he had always got well within four or five days. Besides this I was
then in trouble owing to the running away of my son Aldo and one of my
servants. What more is there to tell? Four days after I had ordered him to
be bled, messengers came to me in the night and begged me to go and see
him, for he was apparently near his end. He was seized with convulsions
and lost his senses, but I battled with the disease and brought him round.
I was obliged to return to Pavia to resume my teaching, and William, when
he was well enough to get up, was forced to sleep in the workshop by his
master, who had been bidden to a wedding. There he suffered so much from
cold and bad food that, when he was setting out for Pavia to seek me, he
was again taken ill. His unfeeling master caused him to be removed to the
poor-house, and there he died the following morning from the violence of
the distemper, from agony of mind, and from the cold he had suffered.
Indeed I was so heavily stricken by mischance that meseemed I had lost
another son."

It was partly as a consolation in his own grief, and partly as a monument
to the ill-fated youth, that Cardan wrote the _Dialogus de Morte_, a work
which contains little of interest beyond the record of Cardan's
impressions of Englishmen already quoted. But it was beyond hope that he
should find adequate solace for the gnawing grief and remorse which
oppressed him in this, or any other literary work. He was ill looked upon
at Milan, but his position at Pavia seems to have been still more irksome.
He grew nervous as to his standing as a physician, for, with the powerful
preju