k at him fiercer than ever, to launch some master-threat
the world has unhappily lost; for as he came with his whisking train,
and shaking his fist, Gerard hurled the bolster furiously in his face
and knocked him down like a shot, the boy's head cracked under his
falling master's, and crash went the dumb-stricken orator into the
basket, and there sat wedged in an inverted angle, crushing phial
after phial. The boy, being light, was strewed afar, but in a squatting
posture; so that they sat in a sequence, like graduated specimens, the
smaller howling. But soon the doctor's face filled with horror, and he
uttered a far louder and unearthly screech, and kicked and struggled
with wonderful agility for one of his age.

He was sitting on the hot coals.

They had singed the cloth and were now biting the man. Struggling wildly
but vainly to get out of the basket, he rolled yelling over with it
sideways, and lo! a great hissing; then the humane Gerard ran and
wrenched off the tight basket not without a struggle. The doctor lay on
his face groaning, handsomely singed with his own chafer, and slaked a
moment too late by his own villainous compounds, which, however, being
as various and even beautiful in colour as they were odious in taste,
had strangely diversified his grey robe, and painted it more gaudy than
neat.

Gerard and Denys raised him up and consoled him. "Courage, man, 'tis
but cautery; balm of Gilead, why, you recommend it but now to my comrade
here."

The physician replied only by a look of concentrated spite, and went out
in dead silence, thrusting his stomach forth before him in the drollest
way. The boy followed him next moment but in that slight interval he
left off whining, burst into a grin, and conveyed to the culprits by an
unrefined gesture his accurate comprehension of, and rapturous though
compressed joy at, his master's disaster.

CHAPTER XXVII

THE worthy physician went home and told his housekeeper he was in agony
from "a bad burn." Those were the words. For in phlogistic as in other
things, we cauterize our neighbour's digits, but burn our own fingers.
His housekeeper applied some old women's remedy mild as milk. He
submitted like a lamb to her experience: his sole object in the case
of this patient being cure: meantime he made out his bill for broken
phials, and took measures to have the travellers imprisoned at once. He
made oath before a magistrate that they, being strangers and indebted t