In the mean time, the maid told the doctor, that a man and a woman waited for him at the door, desiring he would come down and look at a sick man, whom they had brought with them, and clapping into his hand the money she had received, the doctor was transported with joy: being paid beforehand, he thought it was a good patient, and should not be neglected. Light, light, cried he to the maid; follow me nimbly. So saying, without staying for the light, he gets to the stair-head in such haste, that, stumbling against the corpse, he gave him a kick that made him tumble down to the stair-foot; he had almost fallen himself along with him. A light! a light! cried he to the maid; quick, quick! At last, the maid came with a light, and he went down stairs with her; but when he saw that what he had kicked down was a dead man, he was so frightened, that he invoked Moses, Aaron, Joshua, Esdras, and all the other prophets of the law. Unhappy man that I am! said he, why did I attempt to come down without a light! I have killed the poor fellow that was brought to me to be cured; questionless, I am the cause of his death, and unless Esdras’s ass [68] comes to assist me, I am ruined. Mercy on me! they will be here out of hand, and drag me out of my house for a murderer. Notwithstanding the perplexity and jeopardy he was in, he had the precaution to shut his door, for fear any one passing by in the street should observe the mischance of which he reckoned himself to be the author. Then he took the corpse into his wife’s chamber, who was ready to swoon at the sight. Alas! cried she, we are utterly ruined and undone, unless we fall upon some expedient to get the corpse out of our house this night. Beyond all question, if we harbour it till morning, our lives must pay for it. What a sad mischance is this! What did you do to kill this man? That is not the question, replied the Jew; our business now is to find out a remedy for such a shocking accident. The doctor and his wife consulted together how to get rid of his dead corpse that night. The doctor racked his brain in vain, he could not think of any stratagem to get clear; but his wife, who was more fertile in invention, said, I have a thought just come into my head: let us carry the corpse to the leads of our house, and tumble him down the chimney into the house of the Mussulman, our next neighbour. This Mussulman was one of the sultan’s purveyors for furnishing oil, butter, and all sorts of fat articles, and had a magazine in his house, where the rats and mice made prodigious havoc.