“Why, bless my soul!” exclaimed the parson, “I am cured; the pain is altogether gone.  Let me have a bumper of claret.”

“That will do,” observed the stranger.  “You are incurable.  You will plunge once more into a life of intemperance and luxury, and once more your complaint, from which you are now free, will return to you.  You will not deny yourself the gratification of your irrational and senseless indulgences, and yet you expect to be cured.  As for me, I can only remove the malady of such persons as you for the present, or time being; but, so long as you return to the exciting cause of it, no earthly skill or power in man can effect a permanent cure.  Now, Cooke, I will relieve you of your rheumatism; but unless you exchange this flimsy stuff for apparel suited to your climate and condition, I feel that I am incapable of rendering you anything but a temporary relief.”

He passed his hands over those parts of his limbs most affected by his complaint, and in a short time he (the philosopher) found himself completely free from his pains.

During those two most extraordinary processes Woodward looked on with a degree of wonder and of interest that might be truly termed intense.  What the operations which took place before him could mean he knew not, but when the stranger turned round to the friar and said,—­“Now bring me to this unhappy girl,” Woodward seized his hat, feeling a presentiment that he was going to the relief of Alice Goodwin, and with hasty steps proceeded to the farm house in which she and her parents lodged.  He was now desperate, and resolved, if courtesy failed, to force one more annihilating glance upon her before the mysterious stranger should arrive.  We need scarcely inform our readers that he was indignantly repulsed by the family; but he was furious, and in spite of all opposition forced his way into her bedroom, to which he was led by her groans—­dying groans they were considered by all around her.  He rushed into her bed-room, and fixed his eye upon her with something like the fury of hell in it.  The poor girl on seeing him a second time fell back and moaned as if she had expired.  The villain stood looking over her in a spirit of the most malignant triumph.

“It is done now,” said he; “there she lies—­a corpse—­and I am now master of my twelve hundred a year.”

He had scarcely uttered the words when he felt a powerful hand grasp him by the shoulder, and send him with dreadful violence to the other side of the room.  On turning round to see who the person was who had actually twirled him about like an infant, he found the large, but benevolent-looking stranger standing at Alice’s bedside, his finger upon the pulse and his eyes intently fixed upon her apparently lifeless features.  He then turned round to Woodward, and exclaimed in a voice of thunder,—­

“She is not dead, villain, and will not die on this occasion:  begone, and leave the room.”