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“My old studies in alchemy,” observed he, “and my sojourn, for above a year past, among a people well versed in the kindly properties of simples, have made a better physician of me than many that claim the medical degree. Here, woman! The child is yours,—she is none of mine,—neither will she recognize my voice or aspect as a father's. Administer this draught, therefore, with thine own hand.”
His dressings were soon applied, and consisted only of some pounded bark, moistened with a fluid that he had expressed from some of the simples of the woods. Among the native tribes of the forest there were always two kinds of leeches to be met with.
Limited as my time was, I found opportunities to scour the whole country-side, "collecting simples". Deep and anxious were my studies on the still deeper and more perplexing profundities of astrology, and I believe I got as far into that abyss of phantasies as my author said he dared to lead me.
With that Denyven departed to apply to his bruises such herbs and simples as a long experience had taught him to be efficacious. He had gone only a few rods, however, when it occurred to him that there were probabilities of a stormy scene in the yard; so he turned on his tracks, and followed Richard Shackford. Torrini was a Neapolitan, who had come to the country seven or eight years before.
Numbers, however, overpowered him; and he fell bleeding from wounds on his head, arm, and body. But being still able to regain his home, though faint with the loss of blood, he bound up his wounds himself, and with the assistance of a doctoress skilled in simples, made such applications of herbs as at the end of several weeks restored him to health again.
He was not only a bold, adventurous practitioner in physic, but also, if your pleasure so chanced to be, an adept who read the stars, and expounded the fortunes of mankind, genethliacally, as he called it, or otherwise. He was a learned distiller of simples, and a profound chemist made several efforts to fix mercury, and judged himself to have made a fair hit at the philosopher's stone.
I omit the odd number of their pills, the destination of certain days and feasts of the year, the superstition of gathering their simples at certain hours, and that so austere and very wise countenance and carriage which Pliny himself so much derides.
These expectations, too, must have been often excited by the startling results of their daily experiments. The most ignorant compounder of simples could not fail to witness the magical transformations of chemical action; and every new product must have added to the probability that the tempting doublets of gold and silver might be thrown from the dice-box with which he was gambling.
I lit me a lamp which I found in an appointed niche, and walked briskly along my ways, coughing, and wishing heartily I had some of those simples which ease a throat that has a tendency to catarrh.
This task, however, Crabbe rightly declined, being diffident as to his scholarship. In October of this year Crabbe was again working hard at his botany for like the Friar in Romeo and Juliet his time was always much divided between the counselling of young couples and the "culling of simples" when his household received the tidings of the death of John Tovell of Parham, after a brief illness.
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