thies shall wake,
The flesh shall thrill, the nerves shall quake,
The wounds renew their clotter'd flood,
And every drop cry blood for blood!

Hardened as he was, the physician felt reluctance to pass the threshold
of the man to whose death he had been so directly, though, so far as the
individual was concerned, mistakingly, accessory.

"Let me pass on, women," he said, "my art can only help the living--the
dead are past our power."

"Nay, but your patient is upstairs--the youngest orphan"--Dwining was
compelled to go into the house. But he was surprised when, the instant
he stepped over the threshold, the gossips, who were busied with the
dead body, stinted suddenly in their song, while one said to the others:

"In God's name, who entered? That was a large gout of blood."

"Not so," said another voice, "it is a drop of the liquid balm."

"Nay, cummer, it was blood. Again I say, who entered the house even
now?"

One looked out from the apartment into the little entrance, where
Dwining, under pretence of not distinctly seeing the trap ladder by
which he was to ascend into the upper part of this house of lamentation,
was delaying his progress purposely, disconcerted with what had reached
him of the conversation.

"Nay, it is only worthy Master Henbane Dwining," answered one of the
sibyls.

"Only Master Dwining," replied the one who had first spoken, in a tone
of acquiescence--"our best helper in need! Then it must have been balm
sure enough."

"Nay," said the other, "it may have been blood nevertheless; for
the leech, look you, when the body was found, was commanded by the
magistrates to probe the wound with his instruments, and how could the
poor dead corpse know that that was done with good purpose?"

"Ay, truly, cummer; and as poor Oliver often mistook friends for enemies
while he was in life, his judgment cannot be thought to have mended
now."

Dwining heard no more, being now forced upstairs into a species of
garret, where Magdalen sat on her widowed bed, clasping to her bosom
her infant, which, already black in the face and uttering the gasping,
crowing sound which gives the popular name to the complaint, seemed on
the point of rendering up its brief existence. A Dominican monk sat near
the bed, holding the other child in his arms, and seeming from time to
time to speak a word or two of spiritual consolation, or intermingle
some observation on the child's disorder.

The mediciner cas