Both were prodigiously learned in the healing art; and had
about them those precious elixirs which so often occur in romances, and
with which patients are so miraculously restored. Abruptly dropping his
master's head from his lap as he fled, poor Wamba caused the knight's
pate to fall with rather a heavy thump to the ground, and if the knave
had but stayed a minute longer, he would have heard Sir Wilfrid utter a
deep groan. But though the fool heard him not, the holy hermits did; and
to recognize the gallant Wilfrid, to withdraw the enormous dagger
still sticking out of his back, to wash the wound with a portion of the
precious elixir, and to pour a little of it down his throat, was with
the excellent hermits the work of an instant: which remedies being
applied, one of the good men took the knight by the heels and the other
by the head, and bore him daintily from the castle to their hermitage in
a neighboring rock. As for the Count of Chalus, and the remainder of the
slain, the hermits were too much occupied with Ivanhoe's case to mind
them, and did not, it appears, give them any elixir: so that, if they
are really dead, they must stay on the rampart stark and cold; or if
otherwise, when the scene closes upon them as it does now, they may
get up, shake themselves, go to the slips and drink a pot of porter, or
change their stage-clothes and go home to supper.
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