280 CHINESE LITERATURE
to travel day and night until they had brought Dr. Hua before him ; and when he arrived, Ts'ao Ts'ao held out his pulse and desired him to diagnose his case.
"'The pain in your Highness's head/ said Dr. Hua, ' arises from wind, and the seat of the disease is the brain, where the wind is collected, unable to get out. Drugs are of no avail in your present condition, foi which there is but one remedy. You must first swallow a dose of hashish, and then with a sharp axe I will split open the back of your head and let the wind out. Thus the disease will be exterminated.'
" Ts'ao Ts'ao here flew into a great rage, and declared that it was a plot aimed at his life ; to which Dr. Hua replied, ' Has not your Highness heard of Kuan Yii's wound in the right shoulder ? I scraped the bone and removed the poison for him without a single sign of fear on his part. Your Highness's disease is but a trifling affair ; why, then, so much suspicion ? '
"'You may scrape a sore shoulder-bone,' said Ts'ao Ts'ao, ' without much risk ; but to split open my skull is quite another matter. It strikes me now that you are here simply to avenge your friend Kuan Yii upon this opportunity.' He thereupon gave orders that the doctor should be seized and cast into prison."
There the unfortunate doctor soon afterwards died, and before very long Ts'ao Ts'ao himself succumbed.
The Shut Hu Chuan is said to have been written by SHIH NAI-AN of the thirteenth century ; but this name does not appear in any biographical collection, and no- thing seems to be known either of the man or of his authorship. The story is based upon the doings of an historical band of brigands, who had actually terrorised
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