"Ah, ah! Yes, yes!" said the doctor, stroking his beard. Then he solemnly strode up as close to the patient as his long rapier, which banged against and entangled itself with the chairs and tables, admitted of his doing, took his hand and felt his pulse, sighing and groaning as he did so in a manner which sounded wonderful enough in the deep silence of reverential awe which prevailed. He then named a hundred and twenty diseases, in Latin and Greek, which Salvator had not, then about the same number which he might possibly have contracted, and ended by saying that although he could not just at that moment exactly name the malady which Salvator was suffering from, he would hit upon a name for it in a short time, and also the proper remedies and treatment for its cure. He then took his departure with the same amount of solemnity with which he had entered, leaving all hands in the due condition of anxiety and alarm. He asked to see Salvator's box downstairs, and Dame Caterina showed him a box, in which were some old clothes of her deceased husband's, and some old boots and shoes. He tapped the box with his hand here and there, saying, with a smile, "We shall see! We shall see!" In an hour or two he came back with a very grand name for what was the matter with Salvator, and several large bottles of a potion with an evil smell, which he directed that the patient should keep on swallowing. That was not such an easy matter, for the patient resisted with might and main, and expressed, as well as he could, his utter abhorrence of this stuff, which seemed to be a brew from the very pit of Acheron. But whether it was that the malady, now that it had got a name, exerted itself more powerfully, or that Splendiano and medicine were working too energetically--enough, with every day and nearly every hour, one might say, Salvator grew weaker and weaker, so that, although Doctor Splendiano Accoramboni asseverated that, the processes of life having come to a complete standstill, he had given the machine an impetus towards renewed activity (as if it had been the pendulum of a clock), all the by-standers doubted of Salvator's recovery, and were disposed to think that the Signor Dottore might, perhaps, have given the pendulum such a rough impulse that it was put out of gear.