terga frowned. "I meant in any disease," he said. "Did I say
extraordinary?"

"Yes," Messer Blondel answered stoutly. The frown had not escaped him.
"But I take it, you are something of a physician yourself?"

"I have studied in the school of Fallopius, the chirurgeon of Padua,"
the scholar answered coldly. "But I am a scholar, Messer Blondel, not a
physician, much less a practitioner of the ancillary art, which I take
to be but a base and mechanical handicraft."

"Yet, chemistry--you pursue that?" the other rejoined with a glance at
the farther table and its load of strange-looking phials and retorts.

"As an amusement," Basterga replied with a gesture of haughty
deprecation. "A parergon, if you please. I take it, a man may dip into
the mystical writings of Paracelsus without prejudice to his Latinity;
and into the cabalistic lore of the school of Cordova without losing his
taste for the pure oratory of the immortal Cicero. Virgil himself, if
we may believe Helinandus, gave the weight of his great name to such
sports. And Cornelius Agrippa, my learned forerunner in Geneva----"

"Went something farther than that!" the Syndic struck in with a meaning
nod, twice repeated. "It was whispered, and more than whispered--I had
it from my father--that he raised the devil here, Messer Blondel; the
very same that at Louvain strangled one of Agrippa's scholars who broke
in on him before he could sink through the floor."

Basterga's face took on an expression of supreme scorn. "Idle tales!" he
said. "Fit only for women! Surely you do not believe them, Messer
Blondel?"

"I?"

"Yes, you, Messer Syndic."

"But this, at any rate, you'll not deny," Blondel retorted eagerly,
"that he discovered the Philosopher's Stone?"

"And lived poor, and died no richer?" Basterga rejoined in a tone of
increasing scorn.

"Well, for the matter of that," the Syndic answered more slowly, "that
may be explained."

"How?"

"They say, and you must have heard it, that the gold he made in that way
turned in three days to egg-shells and parings of horn."

"Yet having it three days," Basterga asked with a sneer, "might he not
buy all he wanted?"

"Well, I can only say that my father, who saw him more than once in the
street, always told me--and I do not know any one who should have known
better----"

"Pshaw, Messer Blondel, you amaze me!" the scholar struck in, rising
from his seat and adopting a tone at once contemptuous and dictatorial.
"