othing was simpler or more ingenious.
It was a clear test. They put you in a scale, and the evidence was
conclusive if you broke the equilibrium. Too heavy, you were hanged; too
light, you were burned. To this day the scales in which sorcerers were
weighed may be seen at Oudewater, but they are now used for weighing
cheeses; how religion has degenerated! Ursus would certainly have had a
crow to pluck with those scales. In his travels he kept away from
Holland, and he did well. Indeed, we believe that he used never to leave
the United Kingdom.

However this may have been, he was very poor and morose, and having made
the acquaintance of Homo in a wood, a taste for a wandering life had
come over him. He had taken the wolf into partnership, and with him had
gone forth on the highways, living in the open air the great life of
chance. He had a great deal of industry and of reserve, and great skill
in everything connected with healing operations, restoring the sick to
health, and in working wonders peculiar to himself. He was considered a
clever mountebank and a good doctor. As may be imagined, he passed for a
wizard as well--not much indeed; only a little, for it was unwholesome
in those days to be considered a friend of the devil. To tell the truth,
Ursus, by his passion for pharmacy and his love of plants, laid himself
open to suspicion, seeing that he often went to gather herbs in rough
thickets where grew Lucifer's salads, and where, as has been proved by
the Counsellor De l'Ancre, there is a risk of meeting in the evening
mist a man who comes out of the earth, "blind of the right eye,
barefooted, without a cloak, and a sword by his side." But for the
matter of that, Ursus, although eccentric in manner and disposition, was
too good a fellow to invoke or disperse hail, to make faces appear, to
kill a man with the torment of excessive dancing, to suggest dreams fair
or foul and full of terror, and to cause the birth of cocks with four
wings. He had no such mischievous tricks. He was incapable of certain
abominations, such as, for instance, speaking German, Hebrew, or Greek,
without having learned them, which is a sign of unpardonable wickedness,
or of a natural infirmity proceeding from a morbid humour. If Ursus
spoke Latin, it was because he knew it. He would never have allowed
himself to speak Syriac, which he did not know. Besides, it is asserted
that Syriac is the language spoken in the midnight meetings at which
uncann