第999页 / 共1118页

The citizen retired in an opposite direction, shuddering and

looking back in alarm: when he reached home he related how a

poisoner had met him with humble and polite manners, but with the

air of an infamous impostor, and with a phial of poison or the

box of powder (he did not know exactly which) in the lining of

his hat, to poison him, if he had not kept him at a distance. "It

was unlucky," said he, "that we were in so private a street; if

it had been in the midst of Milan, I would have called the

people, and he would have been seized: but alone, it was enough

to have saved myself-but who knows what destruction he may not

already have effected in the city:"-and years after, when the

poisoners were talked of, the poor man maintained the truth of

the fact, as "he had had ocular proof."