To every side of him the inhabitants of Turoine were about their arts: and Gerald, as a former student of magic, quite naturally observed their various activities with interest. Now the first sorcerer that he encountered was making a figure out of pink wax with which was mixed baptismal oil and the ashes of a consecrated wafer. The next sorcerer was murmuring charms over a very fat toad which was imprisoned in a net rudely woven out of the golden hairs from the head of some luckless, unresponsive woman, who was now about to meet a not wholly desirable doom after that toad had been buried at her threshold. And the third sorcerer huddled over a small fire wherein burned cypress branches and broken crucifixes and portions of a gibbet. In his hand was a skull filled with dark wine which had been seasoned with hemp and with the fat of a girl child and with poppy seed: and his familiar, in the shape of a large dun-colored cat, was lapping up that bitter drink. No sorcerer anywhere in Turoine was idle upon this fine May morning. And in this small, ever-busy city—where all the buildings were quaintly marked with stars and pentagrams and the signs of the zodiac and the two kinds of triangles, and were cozily overgrown with honeysuckle and arum lilies and black poppies and deadly nightshade,—these sorcerers were about a bewildering variety of studies. “I,” one of them told Gerald, “am learning the secrets which proceed from Saturn, that ashy lord of the greater infortune. I have especial power over all husbandmen and beggars, over grandfathers and monks of every order and ministers of the gospel, over all potters, and miners, and gardeners, and cow-tenders. I have learned how to make men envious, covetous, slow of thought, suspicious, and stubborn. And I am also able to afflict whatsoever person I elect with toothache and dropsy and black jaundice and leprosy and hemorrhoids, either severally or in unison.” Another said: “I study to divine and to make smooth the approach of every evil fortune,—with smoke and arrows and wax, with an egg, with mice, and with the simulacra of dead persons;—but, above all, as you may perceive, I have been most successful with the head of an ass in a brazier of live coals. And my guide is not any bow-legged, swarthy eunuch, but Leonard, the Grand Master of the Sabbat.” “I,” said a third, “have found in Turoine the Great Juggle Bag, for my guide is Baalberith. So have I mastered all kinds of unheard-of, secret, merry feats and mysteries and inventions—” “But what,” asked Gerald, “what purpose does your knowledge serve?”