The famous Doctor Morpurgo was a fine-looking man, dressed in bright scarlet, who had a thin, coalblack beard hanging over his breast.  His movements were measured and haughty, the bows and gestures with which he saluted the assembled crowd, patronizing and affable.  After a sufficient number of curious persons had gathered around his cart, which was stocked with boxes and vials, he began to address them in broken Dutch, spiced with numerous foreign words.

He praised the goodness of the Providence which had created the marvel of human organism.  Everything, he said, was arranged and formed wisely and in the best possible manner, but in one respect nature fared badly in the presence of adepts.

“Do you know where the error is, ladies and gentlemen?” he asked.

“In the purse,” cried a merry barber’s clerk, “it grows prematurely thin every day.”

“Right, my son,” answered the quack graciously.  “But nature also provides it with the great door from which your answer has come.  Your teeth are a bungling piece of workmanship.  They appear with pain, decay with time, and so long as they last torture those who do not industriously attend to them.  But art will correct nature.  See this box—­” and he now began to praise the tooth-powder and cure for toothache he had invented.  Next he passed to the head, and described in vivid colors, its various pains.  But they too were to be cured, people need only buy his arcanum.  It was to be had for a trifle, and whoever bought it could sweep away every headache, even the worst, as with a broom.

Adrian listened to the famous doctor with mouth wide open.  Specially sweet odors floated over to him from the hot surface of the stove before the booth, and he would have gladly allowed himself a plate of fresh cakes.  The baker’s stout wife even beckoned to him with a spoon, but he closed his hand around the purse and again turned his eyes towards the quack, whose cart was now surrounded by men and women buying tinctures and medicines.

Henrica lay ill in his father’s house.  He had been taken into her room twice, and the beautiful pale face, with its large dark eyes, had filled his heart with pity.  The clear, deep voice in which she addressed a few words to him, also seemed wonderful and penetrated the inmost depths of his soul:  He was told one morning that she was there, and since that time his mother rarely appeared and the house was far more quiet than usual; for everybody walked lightly, spoke in subdued tones, rapped cautiously at a window instead of using the knocker, and whenever Bessie or he laughed aloud or ran up or down-stairs, Barbara, his mother, or Trautchen appeared and whispered:  “Gently, children, the young lady has a headache.”

There were many bottles in the cart which were warranted to cure the ailment, and the famous Morpurgo seemed to be a very sensible man, no buffoon like the other mountebanks.  The wife of the baker, Wilhelm Peterssohn, who stood beside him, a woman he knew well, said to her companion that the doctor’s remedies were good, they had quickly cured her godmother of a bad attack of erysipelas.