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A little blood-letting will cure all his ills for ever." Upon the morrow Galeotto picked thirty of his men, and gave them their orders. They were to depose their black liveries, and clad as countryfolk, but armed as countryfolk would be for a long journey, they were severally to repair afoot to Piacenza, and assemble there upon the morning of Saturday at the time and place he indicated.
Thus on the precarious path of a belated morning frost, breaking through here, jumping over there, I leave Lasgird and its memories of wedding processions, and blood-letting, its huge mud fortress, its pomegranates, and its discomforts. Three miles of mostly ridable gravel bring me to another village, and to four miles of horrible mud in getting through its fields and over its ditches.
"They grow fat, idle, insolent, quarrelsome-never at peace among themselves; never a Pater or an Ave too many, or a task fulfilled, save for fear of stripes. I would that the time of blood-letting were here that their high stomachs might be brought low. I am no longer young, my Father, and this burden tries me sorely. Prithee, let it be shifted to another and a stronger back."
Symonds relate, in his history of the Italian Renaissance, how a certain pope vivisected little children in the hope of prolonging his own infamous existence? In other words, the pope believed in the doctrine of transfusion of blood, and hapless little lads were bribed into undergoing the operation of blood-letting in order that the veins of the pontiff should be thereby revivified.
My sword will mark him worse than my elbow, if he wants blood-letting, that I swear." Now with jests and excuses they fell back one and all. There were few of them who did not know that, lame as he might be now, old Gallus was still the fiercest and most dreaded swordsman of his legion.
The patient wants to eat, it wants to breathe the fresh air, but as such desires may offend the susceptibility of the physician who thinks that he has already provided everything necessary, it suffers and pines away from fear of receiving scolding, of getting another plaster and a new blood-letting, and so on indefinitely.
If this fever did not leave him, he must try blood-letting on himself, as though in a tertian. He returned resolutely to his work. But when he had ground and polished for half an hour, and felt soothed, "Why should I not go to Scheveningen all the same?" he asked himself. Why should he miss the smallest chance of seeing his old friends who had taken the trouble to call on him twice?
"Not I," said the king's treasurer, beginning to twirl his moustache also: "the doctors have always told me that I am of too full a complexion and that it would do me all the good in the world to be bled now and then. But what would be an advantage to me would be dangerous to you. It's easy to see from your jaundiced phiz that for you blood-letting is no cure."
Until about four o'clock in the morning I was able to resist the somnolence which weighed down my eyelids but at last, exhausted with so many hours' march, with the high tension to which my nerves had been pitched and weakened by the abundant blood-letting in the swamp, my body triumphed over my will and I also slept.
How could a doctor remedy this by a prescription? Impossible. The doctor, indeed, recommended blood-letting; but to lose blood in a peaceable manner was not only cowardly, but a bad cure for courage. Neal declined it: he would lose no blood for any man until he could not help it; which was giving the character of a hero at a single touch.
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