[The Cloister and the Hearth by Charles Reade]@TWC D-Link book
The Cloister and the Hearth

CHAPTER XXVI
16/23

Our cure lost his memory.

I brought it him back on the point of my lance; I bled him behind the ear.

I bled a dolt of a boy, and now he is the only one who can tell his right hand from his left in a whole family of idiots.

When the plague was here years ago, no sham plague, such as empyrics proclaim every six years or so, but the good honest Byzantine pest, I blooded an alderman freely, and cauterized the symptomatic buboes, and so pulled him out of the grave; whereas our then chirurgeon, a most pernicious Arabist, caught it himself, and died of it, aha, calling on Rhazes, Avicenna, and Mahound, who, could they have come, had all perished as miserably as himself." "Oh, my poor ears," sighed Gerard.
"And am I fallen so low that one of your presence and speech rejects my art and listens to a rude soldier, so far behind even his own miserable trade as to bear an arbalest, a worn-out invention, that German children shoot at pigeons with, but German soldiers mock at since ever arquebusses came and put them down ?" "You foul-mouthed old charlatan," cried Denys, "the arbalest is shouldered by taller men than ever stood in Rhenish hose, and even now it kills as many more than your noisy, stinking arquebus, as the lancet does than all our toys together.

Go to! He was no fool who first called you 'leeches.' Sang-sues! va!" Gerard groaned.


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