Page:"The Mummy" Volume 2.djvu/231

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THE MUMMY.
223

ing him, in a transport of delight; "say no more—I see, I comprehend the whole! I shall restore him, and receive my liberty as the reward. Nay more, I shall obtain immortality amongst the Spaniards by the deed; their poets will sing my fame, and their historians will pause upon the fact!"

"You will undertake it then?" said the alcaide, and, reading an indignant affirmative in the doctor's looks, he led the way to a camp, at a short distance from the village, where the paralytic general was sitting in a kind of throne, placed without his tent, and surrounded by the principal officers of his staff; the electrical machine, a large, clumsy, heavy-looking thing, standing before him. The doctor looked with dismay at this unwieldy apparatus, so different from his own neat, powerful compendium of science, as he was wont to call it; and saw with infinite horror that even its construction was totally different from those he had been accustomed to. His natural vanity and presumption, however, revolted from making this mortifying acknowledgment, particularly after the boasts he had been indulging in to the alcaide;