expires; and also the dying man! Yes, there is the bed—his own bed—with posts and canopy; as wide as it is long, shut in by heavy curtains. Is it possible that this is the pallet of a wretched herring-salter? With a quaking hand Dr. Trifulgas seizes the curtains; he opens them; he looks in.
"Dr. Trifulgas seizes the curtains."
The dying man, his head uncovered, is motionless, as if at his last breath. The doctor leans over him—
Ah! what a cry, to which, outside, responds an unearthly howl from the dog. The dying man is not the herring-salter, Vort Kartif—it is Dr. Trifulgas; it is he, whom congestion has attacked—he himself! Cerebral apoplexy, with sudden accumulation of serosity in the cavities of the brain, with paralysis of the body on the side opposite that of the seat of the lesion.
Yes, it is he, who was sent for, and for whom a hundred and twenty fretzers have been paid. He who, from hardness of heart, refused to attend the herring-salter—he who is dying.
Dr. Trifulgas is like a madman, he knows himself lost. At each moment the symptoms increase. Not only all the functions of the organs slacken, but the lungs and the heart cease to act. And yet he has not quite lost consciousness. What can be done? Bleed! If he hesitates, Dr. Trfulgas is dead. In those days they still bled; and then, as now, medical men cured all those apoplectic patients who were not going to die.
Dr. Trifulgas seizes his case, takes out his lancet, opens a vein in the arm of his double. The blood does not flow. He rubs his chest violently—his own breathing grows slower. He warms his feet with hot bricks—his own grow cold.
Then his double lifts himself, falls back, and draws one last breath. Dr. Trifulgas, notwithstanding all that his science has taught him to do, dies beneath his own hands.
VII.
In the morning a corpse was found in the house Six-four—that of Dr. Trifulgas. They put him in a coffin, and carried him with much pomp to the cemetery of Luktrop, whither he had sent so many others—in a professional manner.
As to old Hurzof, it is said that, to this day, he haunts the country with his lantern alight, and howling like a lost dog. I do not know if that be true; but strange things happen in Volsinia, especially in the neighbourhood of Luktrop.
And, again, I warn you not to hunt for that town on the map. The best geographers have not yet agreed as to its latitude—nor even as to its longitude.
