"I thought you must know."

"I--how should I?" asked the leech. "I have told you--they would not even
let me try to find out how the hand of a forger moves."

"Consider, the scripture tells us the passage of the soul depends on the
preservation of the body."

Nebsecht looked up with his cunning little eyes and shrugging his
shoulders, said:

"Then no doubt it is so: however these things do not concern me. Do what
you like with the souls of men; I seek to know something of their bodies,
and patch them when they are damaged as well as may be."

"Nay-Toth be praised, at least you need not deny that you are master in
that art."

[Toth is the god of the learned and of physicians. The Ibis was
sacred to him, and he was usually represented as Ibis-headed. Ra
created him "a beautiful light to show the name of his evil enemy."
Originally the Dfoon-god, he became the lord of time and measure.
He is the weigher, the philosopher among the gods, the lord of
writing, of art and of learning. The Greeks called him Hermes
Trismegistus, i.e. threefold or "very great" which was, in fact, in
imitation of the Egyptians, whose name Toth or Techud signified
twofold, in the same way "very great"]

"Who is master," asked Nebsecht, "excepting God? I can do nothing,
nothing at all, and guide my instruments with hardly more certainty than
a sculptor condemned to work in the dark."

"Something like the blind Resu then," said Pentaur smiling, "who
understood painting better than all the painters who could see."

"In my operations there is a 'better' and a 'worse;'" said Nebsecht, "but
there is nothing 'good.'"

"Then we must be satisfied with the 'better,' and I have come to claim
it," said Pentaur.

"Are you ill?"

"Isis be praised, I feel so well that I could uproot a palm-tree, but I
would ask you to visit a sick girl. The princess Bent-Anat--"

"The royal family has its own physicians."

"Let me speak! the princess Bent-Anat has run over a young girl, and the
poor child is seriously hurt."

"Indeed," said the student reflectively. "Is she over there in the city,
or here in the Necropolis?"

"Here. She is in fact the daughter of a paraschites."

"Of a paraschites?" exclaimed Nebsecht, once more slipping the rabbit
under the table, then I will go."

"You curious fellow. I believe you expect to find something strange among
the unclean folk."

"That is my affair; but I will go. What is the man's