Elsewhere mention has been made of a thousand pounds _ordered_ to be paid Sir Edmund King for promptly bleeding Charles the Second. A nobler fee was given by a French lady to a surgeon, who used his lancet so clumsily that he cut an artery instead of a vein, in consequence of which the lady died. On her death-bed she, with charming humanity and irony, made a will, bequeathing the operator a life annuity of eight hundred livres, on condition "that he never again bled anybody so long as he lived." In the _Journal Encylopédique_ of Jan. 15, 1773, a somewhat similar story is told of a Polish princess, who lost her life in the same way. In her will, made _in extremis_, there was the following clause:--"Convinced of the injury that my unfortunate accident will occasion to the unhappy surgeon who is the cause of my death, I bequeath to him a life annuity of two hundred ducats, secured by my estate, and forgive his mistake from my heart: I wish this may indemnify him for the discredit which my sorrowful catastrophe will bring upon him." A famous French Maréchal reproved the clumsiness of a phlebotomist in a less gratifying manner. Drawing himself away from the bungling operator, just as the incision was about to be made, he displayed an unwillingness to put himself further in the power of a practitioner, who, in affixing the fillet, had given him a blow with the elbow in the face. "My Lord," said the surgeon, "it seems that you are afraid of the bleeding." "No," returned the Maréchal, "not of the bleeding--but the bleeder." Monsieur, brother of Louis XIV., had an insuperable aversion to the operation, however dexterous might be the operator. At Marly, while at table with the King, he was visited with such ominous symptoms, that Fochon, the first physician of the court, said--"You are threatened with apoplexy, and you cannot be too soon blooded." But the advice was not acted on, though the King entreated that it might be complied with. "You will find," said Louis, "what your obstinacy will cost you. We shall be awoke some of these nights to be told that you are dead." The royal prediction, though not fulfilled to the letter, soon proved substantially true. After a gay supper at St. Cloud, Monsieur, just as he was about to retire to bed, quitted the world. He was asking M. de Ventadour for a glass of liqueur sent him by the Duke of Savoy, when he dropped down dead. Anyhow Monsieur went out of this life thinking of something nice. The Marquis of Hertford, with all his deliberation, could not do more.