CHAPTER LXXXVIII.

AN INCIDENT WHICH BRINGS THE AUTHOR INTO A FORTUITOUS RESEMBLANCE WITH THE PATRIARCH OF THE PREDICANT FRIARS. DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THE FACT AND THE FABLE; AND AN APPLICATION WHICH, UNLIKE THOSE THAT ARE USUALLY APPENDED TO ESOP'S FABLES, THE READER IS LIKELY NEITHER TO SKIP NOR TO FORGET.

Diré aqui una maldad grande del Demonio.

PEDRO DE CIEÇA DE LEON.             

While I was writing that last chapter, a flea appeared upon the page before me, as there did once to St. Dominic.

But the circumstances in my case and in St. Dominic's were different.

For, in the first place I, as has already been said, was writing; but St. Dominic was reading.

Secondly, the flea which came upon my paper was a real flea, a flea of flea-flesh and blood, partly flea-blood and partly mine, which the said flea had flea-feloniously appropriated to himself by his own process of flea-botomy. That which appeared upon St. Dominic's book was the Devil in disguise.

The intention with which the Devil abridged himself into so diminutive a form, was that he might distract the Saint's attention from his theological studies, by skipping upon the page, and perhaps provoke him to unsaintlike impatience by eluding his fingers.

But St. Dominic was not so to be deceived: he knew who the false flea was!

To punish him therefore for this diabolical intrusion, he laid upon him a holy spell whereby Flea Beelzebub was made to serve as a marker through the whole book. When Dominic, whether in the middle of a sentence or at the end, lifted his eyes from the page in meditation, Flea Beelzebub moved to the word at which the Saint had paused,—he moved not by his own diabolical will, but in obedience to an impulse which he had no power to resist; and there he remained, having as little power to remove, till the Saint's eye having returned to the book, and travelled farther, stopt at another passage. And thus St. Dominic used him through the volume, putting him moreover whenever he closed the book to the peine forte et dure.

When Dominic had finished the volume, he dismissed his marker. Had it been a heretic, instead of the Devil, the canonized founder of the Friars Predicant, and Patron Saint of the Inquisition, would not have let him off so easily.

Indeed I cannot but think that his lenity in this case was ill-placed. He should have dealt with that flea as I did with mine.

“How, Mr. Author, was that?”

“I dealt with it, Sir, as Agesilaus unceremoniously did with one victim upon the altar of Chalciœcious Pallas, at the same time that with all due ceremony he was sacrificing another. An ox was the premeditated and customary victim; the extemporaneous and extraordinary one was a six-footed ‘small deer.’ Plutarch thought the fact worthy of being recorded; and we may infer from it that the Spartans did not always comb their long hair so carefully as the Three Hundred did at Thermopylæ, when on the morning of that ever glorious fight, they made themselves ready to die there in obedience to the institutions of their country. What the King of Lacedæmon did with his crawler, I did with my skipper;—I cracked it, Sir.”

“And for what imaginable reason can you have thought fit to publish such an incident to the world?”

“For what reason, Sir?—why, that Hop-o'-my-thumb the critic may know what he has to expect, if I lay hold of him!”