"What price art thou willing to pay for thy forfeit life, if thy sentence is commuted to exile from this land?"
"Price? Canst thou mean it? I will fill thy chambers with gold."
"I seek it not--albeit," added the worthy bishop, "some were fitly bestowed on the poor--but that thou, whose former crime hast brought a worthy youth to the block, shouldst undo the mischief as far as thou art able."
"But what can I do? who would heed me?"
"Dost thou not know of a drug, which shall throw the drinker thereof into a trance, so like death that all shall believe him dead?"
"I do indeed."
"And art thou sure of thy power to revive the sleeper from this seeming death, after the lapse of days--after men have committed him as a corpse to the tomb?"
"I can do so with facility if I have the necessary drugs; but I am stripped of all. Were I in London--"
"Hast thou no brethren in Oxenford?"
"Yea, verily, I remember Zacharias the Jew, who lives hard by the river, in the parish of St. Ebba."