It was indeed an oasis to have discovered in this desert of a great city; and when, in the course of months, fame and fortune, at the instigation of an appreciative patron, leaped upon the humble street player, he did not forget to whom his success had been primarily due, but he sought out Salvator in his abode, and insisted on renting from him at a princely figure a suite of upper rooms in the house in Birchin Lane. And there he made his lodging, greatly to the satisfaction of his landlord, who, for all he was in no need of having patients harped to his door, was yet by far too upright a man ever to be counted a rich one. “Phlebotomy, the conduct of a clyster, the sane mixing of a potion, the spreading of an adequate plaster--what more,” he would say to his tenant, “is needed to fulfil the functions of an honest practitioner? There be some, plain quacksalvers, who, seeking to supplement the legitimate by abstruse suggestion, adorn their chambers with the dried bodies of toads, crocadilloes, venomous asps contained in spirit, and other such _monstra horrenda_ of a cheating fancy; whereby, indeed, if they show their improbity, they exhibit a true knowledge of the uses of the imagination, which will for ever pay to mystery the treble of what reason would pay to knowledge. But not of such _suggestio falsi_ is my dealing: and, though I suffer by it, I would rather suffer in the company of Galen than prosper in that of Cornelius Tilbury.” “Yet,” says Bannister, pointing to the astral globe, “you are not, it seems, for limiting your prescriptions to the terrestrial?” “Why,” answered Salvator (whose real unprofessional name, by the way, was Shovel), “am I so dense and blind to the sources of light and life as to claim an independence for our planet? The herb is as much of heaven as the star, and the sign-manual of our origin is printed on man and flower alike. So must we consult man for heaven and heaven for man, his lines, his indications, whether derived from this celestial House or the other. For which reason I believe in astrology as in chiromancy, since both guide me to the association of a particular humour in a patient’s blood with its corresponding cause and remedy, they all being contained in his nativity, or horoscope, that is to say--man and season and herb alike. Without subscribing to the fantastical conceits of Gaule and Indagine, who profess to find in the palm of the hand a country of seven hills, each, as it were, a watershed laced with innumerable descending rivulets of tendency, I confess that I see no reason why what life hath marked on a man the Source of life had not in the first instance predestined there. Light is what I seek, and that comes not from the earth.”