Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/531

Rh making for the door. These scenes of pain make no impression upon the monks, one of them prostrate and exhausted and carried by a good rustic who salutes the company with his fur cap, while another is exhibiting his affliction and asking for deliverance from it.

Another design, likewise by Brueghel le Vieux, is still more suggestive. It is a bald caricature, directly aimed against the quacks. The scene is not laid in a shop, but in the open air, with a staging put upon barrels, on which the operator (alone this time) exercises his wonderful talent. The crowd is gathering around him, presenting a curious series of types; some gaping with astonishment, some frightened, and others rejoicing as if at the approach of deliverance. One unfortunate has just passed through the hands of the operator; an assistant is applying a restorative liniment to the open wound, while the victim is gazing sadly at the pebble which is supposed to have been taken from his head. Another one is about to be placed in the fatal chair; the surgeon with his lantern carefully examines the offensive body. The patient howls, but a matron holds his head firmly. Another one is being brought up with a tumor larger than an orange on his head. Hidden under a stool is a confederate with a basket full of stones, ready to be passed at the proper moment, as the ball is passed to the juggler—and he is a confederate who can be relied upon, for his lips are closed by a padlock to secure his silence. The satirical intention of this curious picture has been marked by the painter himself in the little sketch outside of its lines on which he has placed his signature. It is a large egg containing an operator and his victim, with stones raining from the patient's head and falling out of the shell.

A like satirical intent may be found in Jan Steen's picture (Fig. 2), although the scene is treated less fancifully. The operator may have been a well-known man; he does not operate in a