It was a clear test. They put you in a scale, and the evidence was

conclusive if you broke the equilibrium. Too heavy, you were hanged; too

light, you were burned. To this day the scales in which sorcerers were

weighed may be seen at Oudewater, but they are now used for weighing

cheeses; how religion has degenerated! Ursus would certainly have had a

crow to pluck with those scales. In his travels he kept away from

Holland, and he did well. Indeed, we believe that he used never to leave

the United Kingdom.

However this may have been, he was very poor and morose, and having made

the acquaintance of Homo in a wood, a taste for a wandering life had

come over him. He had taken the wolf into partnership, and with him had

gone forth on the highways, living in the open air the great life of

chance. He had a great deal of industry and of reserve, and great skill

in everything connected with healing operations, restoring the sick to

health, and in working wonders peculiar to himself. He was considered a

clever mountebank and a good doctor. As may be imagined, he passed for a

wizard as well--not much indeed; only a little, for it was unwholesome

in those days to be considered a friend of the devil. To tell the truth,

Ursus, by his passion for pharmacy and his love of plants, laid himself

open to suspicion, seeing that he often went to gather herbs in rough

thickets where grew Lucifer's salads, and where, as has been proved by

the Counsellor De l'Ancre, there is a risk of meeting in the evening

mist a man who comes out of the earth, "blind of the right eye,

barefooted, without a cloak, and a sword by his side." But for the

matter of that, Ursus, although eccentric in manner and disposition, was

too good a fellow to invoke or disperse hail, to make faces appear, to

The Man Who Laughs