The Legend of Ulenspiegel Volume I Part 34

Then said Ulenspiegel, speaking to his a.s.s:

"Up, Jef, and salute Monseigneur."

The a.s.s got up and began to bray again. Then both of them took themselves off.

LXI

Soetkin and Nele were seated at one of the windows of the cottage and looked into the street.

Soetkin said to Nele:

"Dearest, see you not my boy Ulenspiegel coming?"

"No," said Nele, "we shall never see him again, the naughty vagabond."

"Nele," said Soetkin, "you must not be angry with him but sorry for him, for he is away from his home, poor fellow."

"I know full well," said Nele, "he hath another house far from here, richer than his own, where some beauteous dame doubtless gives him lodging."

"That would be good luck indeed for him," said Soetkin; "mayhap there he feedeth upon ortolans."

"Why do they not give him stones to eat: speedily would he be here then, the glutton!" said Nele.

Then Soetkin laughed and said:

"Whence doth it arise then, dearest, all this big anger?"

But Claes, who, all pensive, too, was binding f.a.ggots in a corner.

"Do you not see," said he, "that she is infatuate for him?"

"Lo you," said Soetkin, "the crafty cunning thing that never murmured word of it! Is it so, dearest, that you long for him?"

"Never believe it," said Nele.

"You will have there," said Claes, "a stout husband with a big mouth, a hollow belly, and a long tongue, turning florins into liards and never a half-penny for his work, always loafing about and measuring the highways with the ell wand of vagabondage."

But Nele replied, all red and cross:

"Why did you not make something different of him?"

"There," said Soetkin, "now she is weeping; hold your tongue, husband."

LXII

Ulenspiegel upon a day came to Nuremberg and gave himself out for a great physician, the conqueror of sickness, a most ill.u.s.trious purger, renowned queller of fevers, celebrated scavenger of plagues, and scourge invincible of the itch and mange.

There were in the hospital so many sick that they could not know where to put them. The master hospitaller hearing of Ulenspiegel's coming, came to see him and inquired if it was true that he could heal all diseases.

"Except the last sickness," replied Ulenspiegel; "but promise me two hundred florins for the cure of all the others, and I will not accept a liard till all your sick confess themselves cured and leave the hospital."

On the morrow he came to the said hospital with a confident look and carrying his phiz solemnly and doctorally. Once within the wards, he took each sick man separately and said:

"Swear," quoth he, "not to confide to any what I am about to tell thee in thine ear. What is thy malady?"

The sick man would tell him, and swear by his almighty G.o.d to hold his tongue.

"Know," said Ulenspiegel, "that I mean to reduce one of you to powder by means of fire, that of this dust or powder I shall concoct a marvellous mixture and give it to all the sick to drink. The one that cannot walk shall be burned. To-morrow I shall come here and standing in the street with the master hospitaller, I shall summon you all crying, 'Let him that is not sick take up his duds and come!'"

In the morning, Ulenspiegel came and called out as he had said. All the sick, the lame, the rheumy, the coughing, the fever stricken, would fain come out together. All were in the street, even some that for ten years had not left their bed.

The master hospitaller asked them if they were cured and could walk.

"Aye," replied they, imagining that one of them was burning in the courtyard.

Ulenspiegel then said to the master hospitaller:

"Pay me, since they are all outside, and declare themselves cured."

The master paid him two hundred florins. And Ulenspiegel departed.

But on the second day the master beheld his sick folk coming back in a worse state than before, save one who, being cured in the open air, was found drunk and singing through the streets: "Noel to the great physician Ulenspiegel!"

LXIII

The two hundred florins having gone their light ways Ulenspiegel came to Vienne where he hired himself to a wheelwright who continually scolded his workmen because they did not blow the bellows of his forge strongly enough:

"Keep time," he would be crying always, "follow with the bellows."

One day when the baes went into the garden Ulenspiegel took down the bellows, carried it off on his shoulders, and followed his master. The latter being astonished to see him so strangely burthened, Ulenspiegel said to him:

"Baes, you ordered me to follow with the bellows, where am I to put this one while I go and fetch the other."

"Dear lad," said the baes, "I did not say that; go and put the bellows back in its place."

However, he studied how to pay him out for this trick. Thenceforward he rose every day at midnight, awoke his men and made them work.