"Your case is not utterly hopeless," I replied with deliberation, having first hemmed and hawed in the style approved of the faculty, "but it demands careful treatment. Methinks from the symptoms that it has hitherto been treated somewhat negligently. I will return to my lodging and ponder upon it, consulting Fernelius, his _Pathologia_" (a work I had seen named in the pages of Ambrose Parey). "To-morrow, by your good leave, I will see you again. The true course is not to be lightly determined, but I trust that my art has resources wherewith to counter the worst symptoms of your distemper and perchance to work a cure." "Do so, good cousin," he said. "Come early, I pray you, and by St. Iago, I shall know how to recompense you becomingly." I took my leave, and when the door was between us, gave a loose to my merriment, hastily composing my features when the majordomo approached to conduct me to the street. I returned to my inn, and buried my nose for some while in the folio; then betook myself to an apothecary’s, where I purchased a quantity of barley creams, poppy seeds, and seeds of lettuce, purslain, and sorrel, commanding him to make a decoction of them and have it ready against I came on the morrow. This was a prescription of Ambrose Parey. I bade him also compound an admixture of the infusion of sundry simples, exceeding nauseous, yet like to do no great hurt, to wit, valerian, quassia, a trifling quantity of colocynthis (which grows very plentifully in Spain), and _pix atra_, by the which you shall understand common tar. This also, a bolus of my own devising, I commanded the man to have in readiness, and then found that I had a good relish for my dinner. [Illustration: I BETOOK MYSELF TO AN APOTHECARY’S] Stubbs had already shown me where the king’s galleys lay; ’twas off the east side of the town, betwixt the island and the mainland. They were four in number: these were the principal galleys, there being sixteen of an inferior sort that rode nigh to the bulwark of _St. Philip_, at the north-east extremity of the town. A strong fortification of stone-work ran from this bulwark towards the water-side, having its southern end beside the king’s storehouse of provision and munition for his ships of war. Here, moreover, was the barrack in which certain of the galley-slaves were cabined at night, for when the galleys lay idle the greater number of the oarsmen was employed on shore in sundry laborious exercises—repairing the fortifications and the like. A little way southward of this barrack was a rampire of earth built close against the sea-wall, and furnished with three great pieces of ordnance. This kind of bulwark is called in military parlance a _terrapleno_. There was in the inner harbour also a fleet of near forty merchant vessels, making ready for the American voyage, and a goodly number of galleons and galliasses for the intended invasion of Ireland.