at are we to do if this should give rise to an outburst of erotic
mania?"

This would not have proved any impediment to Bouvard; but for fear of
impostures and attempts to extort hush-money, it was better to put aside
the project. They contented themselves with a collection of musical
glasses, which they carried about with them to the different houses, so
as to delight the children.

One day, when Migraine was worse, they had recourse to the musical
glasses. The crystalline sounds exasperated him; but Deleuze enjoins
that one should not be frightened by complaints; and so they went on
with the music.

"Enough! enough!" he cried.

"A little patience!" Bouvard kept repeating.

Pecuchet tapped more quickly on the glass plates, and the instrument was
vibrating in the midst of the poor man's cries when the doctor appeared,
attracted by the hubbub.

"What! you again?" he exclaimed, enraged at finding them always with his
patients.

They explained their magnetic method of curing. Then he declaimed
against magnetism--"a heap of juggleries, whose effects came only from
the imagination."

However, animals are magnetised. Montacabere so states, and M. Fontaine
succeeded in magnetising a lion. They had not a lion, but chance had
offered them another animal.

For on the following day a ploughboy came to inform them that they were
wanted up at the farm for a cow in a hopeless condition.

They hurried thither. The apple trees were in bloom, and the herbage in
the farmyard was steaming under the rays of the rising sun.

At the side of a pond, half covered with a cloth, a cow was lowing,
while she shivered under the pails of water that were being emptied over
her body, and, enormously swollen, she looked like a hippopotamus.

Without doubt she had got "venom" while grazing amid the clover. Pere
Gouy and his wife were afflicted because the veterinary surgeon was not
able to come, and the wheelwright who had a charm against swelling did
not choose to put himself out of his way; but "these gentlemen, whose
library was famous, must know the secret."

Having tucked up their sleeves, they placed themselves one in front of
the horns, the other at the rump, and, with great internal efforts and
frantic gesticulations, they spread wide their fingers in order to
scatter streams of fluid over the animal, while the farmer, his wife,
their son, and the neighbours regarded them almost with terror.

The rumblings which were heard in t