"I pardon your majesty's anger, for it hath its source in grief," replied John of the Silvermills, calmly; "nature is full of mysteries. Our cradle and our coffin may be formed from the same tree, and yet we be ignorant thereof. Paracelsus----" "I say again, Mahound take Paracelsus! but what doth this trite remark mean?" "That, like the mass of the unlettered world, your majesty scoffs at what appears incomprehensible, and----" The apothegar paused, for the arras was raised by a hand covered by a glove of fine scarlet leather, and Cardinal Beaton, who at all hours had the _entrée_ of the king's apartments, stood before them, and both king and subject knelt to kiss his ring. "The peace of the Lord be with thee and with thy spirit!" said the cardinal, seating himself, and looking kindly at the king, whose grief and distress were marked in every feature of his fine face. "In the ante-chamber I have heard how poorly her majesty is, and Mademoiselle Brissac has just been imploring my prayers, poor child! But proceed, my learned doctor," he added, with a slight smile; while the deacon of the surgeons again perched his chin on the top of his cane, which was half hidden by his long white beard, and thus continued-- "Your majesty rails at the learned Paracelsus; I can afford to pardon that, when I remember me that to him we are indebted for introducing to the pharmacopœia, the mercurial, the antimonial, and ferruginous preparations which act so beneficially upon the organs of our system." "But is not this Paracelsus, of whom thou boastest, an impure pantheist," asked the cardinal, "who, while believing in the existence of pure spirits which are without souls, receives aliment from minerals and fluids, and whose physiological theories are a wild mass of the most incoherent ideas, founded almost solely upon an application of the damnable mysteries of the cabala to the natural functions of the frame which God has given us?"