and to recognize the gallant Wilfrid, to withdraw the enormous dagger still sticking out of his back, to wash the wound with a portion of the precious elixir, and to pour a little of it down his throat, was with the excellent hermits the work of an instant:  which remedies being applied, one of the good men took the knight by the heels and the other by the head, and bore him daintily from the castle to their hermitage in a neighboring rock.  As for the Count of Chalus, and the remainder of the slain, the hermits were too much occupied with Ivanhoe’s case to mind them, and did not, it appears, give them any elixir:  so that, if they are really dead, they must stay on the rampart stark and cold; or if otherwise, when the scene closes upon them as it does now, they may get up, shake themselves, go to the slips and drink a pot of porter, or change their stage-clothes and go home to supper.  My dear readers, you may settle the matter among yourselves as you like.  If you wish to kill the characters really off, let them be dead, and have done with them:  but, entre nous, I don’t believe they are any more dead than you or I are, and sometimes doubt whether there is a single syllable of truth in this whole story.

Well, Ivanhoe was taken to the hermits’ cell, and there doctored by the holy fathers for his hurts; which were of such a severe and dangerous order, that he was under medical treatment for a very considerable time.  When he woke up from his delirium, and asked how long he had been ill, fancy his astonishment when he heard that he had been in the fever for six years!  He thought the reverend fathers were joking at first, but their profession forbade them from that sort of levity; and besides, he could not possibly have got well any sooner, because the story would have been sadly put out had he appeared earlier.  And it proves how good the fathers were to him, and how very nearly that scoundrel of a Roger de Backbite’s dagger had finished him, that he did not get well under this great length of time; during the whole of which the fathers tended him without ever thinking of a fee.  I know of a kind physician in this town who does as much sometimes; but I won’t do him the ill service of mentioning his name here.

Ivanhoe, being now quickly pronounced well, trimmed his beard, which by this time hung down considerably below his knees, and calling for his suit of chain-armor, which before had fitted his elegant person as tight as wax, now put it on, and it bagged and hung so loosely about him, that even the good friars laughed at his absurd appearance.  It was impossible that he should go about the country in such a garb as that:  the very boys would laugh at him:  so the friars gave him one of their old gowns, in which he disguised himself, and after taking an affectionate farewell of his friends, set forth on his return to his native country.  As he went along, he learned that Richard was dead, that John reigned, that Prince Arthur had been poisoned, and was of course made acquainted with various other facts of public importance recorded in Pinnock’s Catechism and the Historic Page.