will cling to
the end of a horse hair is sufficient to cure. Alas, in his professional
zeal and excitement, the celebrated pathologist permitted his hand to
shake like a myrtle leaf in a Spring gale, and so he dropped not only
the contents of the vial, but also the vial itself down the oesophagus
of his moribund patient.

The accident, however, did not impede the powerful effects of this
famous remedy. In ten minutes Chu Yi-Foy was so far recovered that he
asked for a plate of rice stewed with plums, and by morning he was able
to leave his bed and receive the reports of his spies, informers and
extortioners. That day he sent for Dr. Yen and in token of his
gratitude, for he was a just and righteous man, settled upon him in due
form of law, and upon his heirs and assigns in perpetuity, the whole
rents, rates, imposts and taxes, amounting to no less than ten thousand
Hangkow taels a year, of two of the streets occupied by money-changers,
bird-cage makers and public women in the town of Szu-Loon, and of the
related alleys, courts and lanes. And Dr. Yen, with his old age and the
old age of his seven sons and thirty-one grandsons now safely provided
for, retired from the practise of his art, and devoted himself to a
tedious scientific inquiry (long the object of his passionate
aspiration) into the precise physiological relation between gravel in
the lower lobe of the heart and the bursting of arteries in the arms and
legs.

So passed many years, while Dr. Yen pursued his researches and sent his
annual reports of progress to the Academy of Medicine at Chan-Si, and
Chu Yi-Foy increased his riches and his influence, so that his arm
reached out from the mountains to the sea. One day, in his eightieth
year, Chu Yi-Foy fell ill again, and, having no confidence in any other
physician, sent once more for the learned and now venerable Dr. Yen.

"I have a pain," he said, "in my left hip, where the stomach dips down
over the spleen. A large knob has formed there. A lizard, perhaps, has
got into me. Or perhaps a small hedge-hog."

Dr. Yen thereupon made use of the test for lizards and hedge-hogs--to
wit, the application of madder dye to the Adam's apple, turning it lemon
yellow if any sort of reptile is within, and violet if there is a
mammal--but it failed to operate as the books describe. Being thus led
to suspect a misplaced and wild-growing bone, perhaps from the vertebral
column, the doctor decided to have recourse to surgery,