O, sir, Domine, bellagivaminor nobis; verily, est bonum vobis.  They are useful to everybody.  If they fit your mare well, so do they do our faculty; quae comparata est jumentis insipientibus, et similis facta est eis, Psalmo nescio quo.  Yet did I quote it in my note-book, et est unum bonum Achilles, a good defending argument.  Hem, hem, hem, haikhash!  For I prove unto you, that you should give me them.  Ego sic argumentor.  Omnis bella bellabilis in bellerio bellando, bellans, bellativo, bellare facit, bellabiliter bellantes.  Parisius habet bellas.  Ergo gluc, Ha, ha, ha.  This is spoken to some purpose.  It is in tertio primae, in Darii, or elsewhere.  By my soul, I have seen the time that I could play the devil in arguing, but now I am much failed, and henceforward want nothing but a cup of good wine, a good bed, my back to the fire, my belly to the table, and a good deep dish.  Hei, Domine, I beseech you, in nomine Patris, Filii, et Spiritus sancti, Amen, to restore unto us our bells:  and God keep you from evil, and our Lady from health, qui vivit et regnat per omnia secula seculorum, Amen.  Hem, hashchehhawksash, qzrchremhemhash.

Verum enim vero, quandoquidem, dubio procul.  Edepol, quoniam, ita certe, medius fidius; a town without bells is like a blind man without a staff, an ass without a crupper, and a cow without cymbals.  Therefore be assured, until you have restored them unto us, we will never leave crying after you, like a blind man that hath lost his staff, braying like an ass without a crupper, and making a noise like a cow without cymbals.  A certain latinisator, dwelling near the hospital, said since, producing the authority of one Taponnus,—­I lie, it was one Pontanus the secular poet, —­who wished those bells had been made of feathers, and the clapper of a foxtail, to the end they might have begot a chronicle in the bowels of his brain, when he was about the composing of his carminiformal lines.  But nac petetin petetac, tic, torche lorgne, or rot kipipur kipipot put pantse malf, he was declared an heretic.  We make them as of wax.  And no more saith the deponent.  Valete et plaudite.  Calepinus recensui.

Chapter 1.XX.

How the Sophister carried away his cloth, and how he had a suit in law against the other masters.

The sophister had no sooner ended, but Ponocrates and Eudemon burst out in a laughing so heartily, that they had almost split with it, and given up the ghost, in rendering their souls to God:  even just as Crassus did, seeing a lubberly ass eat thistles; and as Philemon, who, for seeing an ass eat those figs which were provided for his own dinner, died with force of laughing.  Together with them Master Janotus fell a-laughing too as fast as he could, in which mood of laughing they continued so long, that their eyes did water by the vehement concussion of the substance of the brain, by which these lachrymal humidities, being pressed out, glided through the optic nerves, and so to the full represented Democritus Heraclitizing and Heraclitus Democritizing.