University of Virginia Library

I.

Summer was come, and all the strong were bowed by the burden of the awful heat, and many of the weak were prostrate and dying. For weeks the army had been wasting away with a plague of dysentery, that scourge of the soldier, and there was but little help. The doctors were in despair; such efficacy as their drugs and their science had once had—and it was not much, at its best—was a thing of the past, and promised to remain so.

The Emperor commanded the physicians of greatest renown to appear before him for a consultation, for he was profoundly disturbed. He was very severe with them, and called them to account for letting his soldiers die; and asked them if they knew their trade, or didn't; and were they properly healers, or merely assassins? Then the principal assassin, who was also the oldest doctor in the land and the most venerable in appearance, answered and said—

"We have done what we could, your Majesty, and for a good reason it has been little: no medicine and no physician can cure that disease; only Nature and a good constitution can do it. I am old, and I know. No doctor and no medicine can cure it—I repeat it and I emphasize it; sometimes they seem to help Nature a little—a very little—but as a rule they merely do damage."

The Emperor was a profane and passionate man, and he deluged the doctors with rugged and unfamiliar names and drove them from his presence. Within a day he was attacked by that fell disease himself. The news flew from mouth to mouth, and carried consternation with it all over the land. All the talk was about this awful disaster, and there was general depression, for few had hope. The Emperor himself was very melancholy, and sighed and said—

"The will of God be done. Send for the assassins again, and let us get over with it."

They came, and felt his pulse, and looked at his tongue, and fetched the drugstore and emptied it into him, and sat down patiently to wait—for they were not paid by the job, but by the year.