To return to where I left my father before this digression. As I said, after the sale of the Ægina Marbles, Haller and he came to Athens, where, finding the summer very hot in the town, they went to live at Padischa or Sadischa, not far outside the town, and set earnestly to work upon the drawings for the book on Ægina and Phigaleia. All went on quietly till on the 22nd of August Cockerell was attacked by a malignant bilious fever, which brought him to death's door: at least, either the illness or the remedies did. The doctor, Abraham, the first in Athens, thought it must be yellow fever, gave him up, and fearing infection for himself, refused to attend him after the first few days. It was even whispered that it might be the plague, for the enormous swelling of the glands was not unlike it. But Haller would listen to no counsels of despair, and refused to leave his friend. The kind Madame Masson, too, the aunt of the Misses Makri, came out from Athens, and the two nursed him with ceaseless devotion. Haller never left his bedside, night or day, for the first month. The vice-consul, hearing that the sufferer was as good as dead, came to take away his keys and put seals upon his property, and was only prevented by Haller by main force. The same faithful friend compelled the doctor to do his duty. The first having deserted his patient, a second was called in and kept attentive by threats and persuasion. The methods of medicine were inconceivably barbarous. Bleeding was the great remedy in fever, and calomel the alternative. When the patient had been brought by this treatment so low that his heart was thought to have stopped, live pigeons were cut in half and the reeking portions applied to his breast to restore the vital heat. Medicine failing, spells were believed in. Madame Masson, though described as one of the first personages in Athens, could neither read nor write, and was grossly ignorant. She had a great faith in spells; and Haller, fearing that in the feeble condition of the patient she might commit some folly, kept a strict watch upon her. One day, however, in his absence, when my father was suffering agonies from his glands, she took the opportunity to tie round his neck a charm of particular potency. It was a little bag containing some resin, some pitch, a lock of hair, and two papers, each inscribed with the figure of a pyramid and other symbols drawn with a pen. They even got so far as to speak of his burial, and it was settled that it should be in the Theseum, where one Tweddle, an Englishman, and other foreigners had been interred, and where Haller himself was laid not many years after.