They had singed the cloth and were now biting the man. Struggling wildly but vainly to get out of the basket, he rolled yelling over with it sideways, and lo! a great hissing: then the humane Gerard ran and wrenched off the tight basket not without a struggle. The doctor lay on his face groaning, handsomely singed with his own chafer, and slaked a moment too late by his own villainous compounds, which however, being as various and even beautiful in colour, as they were odious in taste, had strangely diversified his grey robe and painted it more gaudy than neat. Gerard and Denys raised him up and consoled him. "Courage, man, 'tis but cautery; balm of Gilead; why you recommended it but now to my comrade here." The physician replied only by a look of concentrated spite, and went out in dead silence, thrusting his stomach forth before him in the drollest way. The boy followed him next moment, but in that slight interval he left off whining, burst in a grin, and conveyed to the culprits by an unrefined gesture his accurate comprehension of, and rapturous though compressed joy at, his master's disaster. CHAPTER XXVII THE worthy physician went home and told his housekeeper he was in agony from "a bad burn." Those were the words. For in phlogistic, as in other things, we cauterize our neighbour's digits, but burn our own fingers. His housekeeper applied some old woman's remedy mild as milk. He submitted like a lamb to her experience: his sole object in the case of this patient being cure: meantime he made out his bill for broken phials, and took measures to have the travellers imprisoned at once. He made oath before a magistrate that they, being strangers and indebted to him, meditated instant flight from the township. Alas! it was his unlucky day. His sincere desire, and honest endeavour, to perjure himself, were baffled by a circumstance he had never foreseen nor indeed thought possible. He had spoken the truth. And IN AN AFFIDAVIT! The officers, on reaching the Silver Lion, found the birds were flown. * * * * * They went down to the river, and, from intelligence they received there started up the bank in hot pursuit. This temporary escape the friends owed to Denys's good sense and observation. After a peal of laughter, that it was a cordial to hear, and after venting his watchword three times, he turned short grave, and told Gerard Dusseldorf was no place for them. "That old fellow," said he, "went off unnaturally silent for such a babbler: we are strangers here: _the bailiff is his friend_: in five minutes we shall lie in a dungeon for assaulting a Dusseldorf dignity: are you strong enough to hobble to the water's edge? it is hard by. Once there you have but to lie down in a boat instead of a bed: and what is the odds?"