f ink; and
Olivarez declares he believes it to have been a preparation of pure
caustic. On the morning of the 9th of May, the Moor and his unguents
were sent away, "and went to Madrid, to send to heaven Hernando de Vega,
while the prince went back to our method of cure."

Considering what happened on the morning of the 10th of May, we should
now presume that the second opening of the abscess, whether by Vesalius
or someone else, relieved the pressure on the brain; that a critical
period of exhaustion followed, probably prolonged by the Moor's premature
caustic, which stopped the suppuration: but that God's good handiwork,
called nature, triumphed at last; and that therefore it came to pass that
the prince was out of danger within three days of the operation. But he
was taught, it seems, to attribute his recovery to a very different
source from that of a German knife. For on the morning of the 9th, when
the Moor was gone, and Don Carlos lay seemingly lifeless, there descended
into his chamber a Deus e machina, or rather a whole pantheon of greater
or lesser deities, who were to effect that which medical skill seemed not
to have effected. Philip sent into the prince's chamber several of the
precious relics which he usually carried about with him. The miraculous
image of the Virgin of Atocha, in embroidering garments for whom, Spanish
royalty, male and female, has spent so many an hour ere now, was brought
in solemn procession and placed on an altar at the foot of the prince's
bed; and in the afternoon there entered, with a procession likewise, a
shrine containing the bones of a holy anchorite, one Fray Diego, "whose
life and miracles," says Olivarez, "are so notorious;" and the bones of
St. Justus and St. Pastor, the tutelar saints of the university of
Alcala. Amid solemn litanies the relics of Fray Diego were laid upon the
prince's pillow, and the sudarium, or mortuary cloth, which had covered
his face, was placed upon the prince's forehead.

Modern science might object that the presence of so many personages,
however pious or well intentioned, in a sick chamber on a hot Spanish May
day, especially as the bath had been, for some generations past, held in
religious horror throughout Spain, as a sign of Moorish and Mussulman
tendencies, might have somewhat interfered with the chances of the poor
boy's recovery. Nevertheless the event seems to have satisfied Philip's
highest hopes; for that same night (so Don Carlos