Every now and then indeed a striking circumstance, strikingly told, occurs in Joinville, such as the famous incident of the woman who carried in one hand a chafing dish of fire, in the other a phial of water, that she might burn heaven and quench hell, lest in future any man should serve God merely for hope of the one or fear of the other.
This theory of the Leyden phial Franklin supported very ingeniously by showing that the outside and the inside coating possessed electricities of opposite sign, and that, in charging it, exactly as much electricity is added on one side as is subtracted from the other.
On these occasions the substance contained in the phial liquefies, and the Neapolitans see in this phenomenon a supernatural manifestation.
How the Saracens, when they took him prisoner, he being half dead with a complication of diseases, kindly left him "un mien couverture d'ecarlate" which his mother had given him, and which he put over him, having made a hole therein and bound it round him with a cord; how when he came to Acre in a pitiable condition an old servant of his house presented himself, and "brought me clean white hoods and combed my hair most comfortably"; how he bought a hundred tuns of wine and served it - the best first, according to high authority - well-watered to his private soldiers, somewhat less watered to the squires, and to the knights neat, but with a suggestive phial of the weaker liquid to mix "si comme ils vouloient" - these are the details in which he seems to take greatest pleasure, and for readers six hundred years after date perhaps they are not the least interesting details.
