I was summoned before the police magistrate.  I had been seen on the night of her disappearance roaming about with a distracted air in the vicinity of the river.  Luckily the judge knew me; luckily also, he was a man of no ordinary intelligence.  I related to him privately the entire story, just as I have been telling it to you.  He dismissed the inquiry; yet I may say that very few have ever had so narrow, an escape as mine from a criminal trial.”

For several moments the silence of the company was unbroken.  Finally a gentleman, wishing to relieve the tension, cried out: 

“Come now, doctor, confess that this is really all fiction; that you merely want to prevent these ladies from getting any sleep to-night.”

Tribourdeaux bowed stiffly, his face unsmiling and a little pale.

“You may take it as you will,” he said.

GIL BLAS AND DR. SANGRADO

BY ALAIN RENE LE SAGE

As I was on my way, who should come across me but Dr. Sangrado, whom I had not seen since the day of my master’s death.  I took the liberty of touching my hat.  He knew me in a twinkling.

“Heyday!” said he, with as much warmth as his temperament would allow him, “the very lad I wanted to see; you have never been out of my thought.  I have occasion for a clever fellow about me, and pitched upon you as the very thing, if you can read and write.”

“Sir,” replied I, “if that is all you require, I am your man.”

“In that case,” rejoined he, “we need look no further.  Come home with me; you will be very comfortable; I shall behave to you like a brother.  You will have no wages, but everything will be found you.  You shall eat and drink according to the true scientific system, and be taught to cure all diseases.  In a word, you shall rather be my young Sangrado than my footman.”

I closed in with the doctor’s proposal, in the hope of becoming an Esculapius under so inspired a master.  He carried me home forthwith, to install me in my honorable employment; which honorable employment consisted in writing down the name and residence of the patients who sent for him in his absence.  There had indeed been a register for this purpose, kept by an old domestic; but she had not the gift of spelling accurately, and wrote a most perplexing hand.  This account I was to keep.  It might truly be called a bill of mortality; for my members all went from bad to worse during the short time they continued in this system.  I was a sort of bookkeeper for the other world, to take places in the stage, and to see that the first come were the first served.  My pen was always in my hand, for Dr. Sangrado had more practise than any physician of his time in Valladolid.  He had got into reputation with the public by a certain professional slang, humored by a medical face, and some extraordinary cures more honored by implicit faith than scrupulous investigation.