Too much stress must not be laid on the troubles of a stranger who fell ill of a less deadly illness. Perhaps, even, a German with the toothache might still have the same experience in Spain as did a countryman of his three hundred years ago. Having tried a cupping-glass himself in vain, he went to the local barber-surgeon; the latter dug the tooth out with a bread-knife! Yet in hospitals a change for the better can be easily proved. The chief hospital at Paris, the Hôtel-Dieu, was visited by an Italian[152] in the middle of the seventeenth century. Three or four men lay in each bed, or two women; and the stench was terrible, even to a seventeenth-century nose. At the galley-slaves' hospital at Marseilles, a boy went in front of visitors with a "pan of perfume." Still more to the point, regarding this particular period, was the predicament of a man at the point of death in a district with a different theological stamp from his own, say, a Protestant in a Roman Catholic country. He would then have the choice of accepting the sacrament in the locally orthodox form or confessing himself a Protestant. In the latter case the priest might cut the heretic off from the help, not only of the doctor, but of the cook also, and if he recovered in spite of this, the Inquisition might be awaiting him. And yet a man of average morality would be far less of an adiaphorist in the sixteenth century than to-day. Some Protestants at Venice resigned themselves at death to the only cemetery-burial—that with Roman Catholic rites; but most chose to be buried at sea off Malamocco, trusting in the phrase, "And the sea shall give up its dead." As to the "sudden death" of which the Litany speaks, if one regards direct evidence only, there may well be a tendency to think the risk of it somewhat exaggerated, but the balance will recover itself if, to the number of travellers who have left us record of their doings, is added that of the dead men who would have told tales if they could. Mile after mile of loneliest road had to be slowly traversed, many a mile through forest where now is open ground, at a time when existed far less force in conventions to restrain those, perhaps even more numerous then than now, like the murderers of Banquo:— ... I am one Whom the vile blows and buffets of the world Have so incensed that I am reckless what I do to spite the world. ... And I another So weary with disasters, tugged with fortune That I would set my life on any chance To mend it or to be rid on't.