cured his lung disorder. The mystery of the "King's Evil" cures probably admits of a similar solution. At a time when scrofula was ten times more prevalent than nowadays, thousands of health-seekers crowded the ante-chambers of royal palaces, to be touched by the hand of an anointed king. The Lord's anointed was in many cases a worn-out rake with his own hide full of germ-diseases, but his touch rarely missed its effect on patients who had come from a considerable distance, whence Dr. Burnett's remark that the natives of farthest Scotland and Ireland trusted the miraculous power of their sovereign more than his next neighbors. Scrofulous cockneys, who could reach the royal presence by crossing the street, crossed in vain; but pilgrims who had come from the other side of the Tweed and starved like Texas temperance editors, returned rejoicing, and would have been cured just as effectually if a Devonshire dairyman had touched them up with his pitchfork. The true believers were mostly children of poverty who had come the long road afoot; and microbes that could have defied the shoulder hits of all the legitimate despots of Christendom had succumbed to a hunger-
