Angélique sat down and leaned towards La Corriveau, supporting her chin on the palms of her hands as she bent eagerly over the table, drinking in every word as the hot sand of the desert drinks in the water poured upon it. “What is that?” said she, pointing to a vial as white as milk and seemingly as harmless. “That,” replied La Corriveau, “is the milk of mercy. It brings on painless consumption and decay. It eats the life out of a man while the moon empties and fills once or twice. His friends say he dies of quick decline, and so he does! ha! ha!--when his enemy wills it! The strong man becomes a skeleton, and blooming maidens sink into their graves blighted and bloodless, with white lips and hearts that cease gradually to beat, men know not why. Neither saint nor sacrament can arrest the doom of the milk of mercy.” “This vial,” continued she, lifting up another from the casket and replacing the first, licking her thin lips with profound satisfaction as she did so,--“this contains the acrid venom that grips the heart like the claws of a tiger, and the man drops down dead at the time appointed. Fools say he died of the visitation of God. The visitation of God!” repeated she in an accent of scorn, and the foul witch spat as she pronounced the sacred name. “Leo in his sign ripens the deadly nuts of the East, which kill when God will not kill. He who has this vial for a possession is the lord of life.” She replaced it tenderly. It was a favorite vial of La Corriveau. “This one,” continued she, taking up another, “strikes with the dead palsy; and this kindles the slow, inextinguishable fires of typhus. Here is one that dissolves all the juices of the body, and the blood of a man's veins runs into a lake of dropsy. This,” taking up a green vial, “contains the quintessence of mandrakes distilled in the alembic when Scorpio rules the hour. Whoever takes this liquid”--La Corriveau shook it up lovingly--“dies of torments incurable as the foul disease of lust which it simulates and provokes.” There was one vial which contained a black liquid like oil. “It is a relic of the past,” said she, “an heir-loom from the Untori, the ointers of Milan. With that oil they spread death through the doomed city, anointing its doors and thresholds with the plague until the people died.” The terrible tale of the anointers of Milan has, since the days of La Corriveau, been written in choice Italian by Manzoni, in whose wonderful book he that will may read it. “This vial,” continued the witch, “contains innumerable griefs, that wait upon the pillows of rejected and heartbroken lovers, and the wisest physician is mocked with lying appearances of disease that defy his skill and make a fool of his wisdom.”