them becomingly?  Dreamest thou they talk and act like checkmen at Banbury fair?  How can thy shallow brain suffice for their vast conceptions?  How darest thou say, as they do:  ’Hang this fellow; quarter that; flay; mutilate; stab; shoot; press; hook; torture; burn alive’?  These are royalties.  Who appointed thee to such office?  The Holy Ghost?  He alone can confer it; but when wert thou anointed?”

William was so zealous in storing up these verities that he looked as though he were unconscious that the pouring-out was over.  He started, which he had not done before, at the voice of Master Silas; but soon recovered his complacency, and smiled with much serenity at being called low-minded varlet.

“Low-minded varlet!” cried Master Silas, most contemptuously, “dost thou imagine that king calleth king, like thy chums, FILCHER and fibber, whirligig and nincompoop?  Instead of this low vulgarity and sordid idleness, ending in nothing, they throw at one another such fellows as thee by the thousand, and when they have cleared the land, render God thanks and make peace.”

Willy did now sigh out his ignorance of these matters; and he sighed, mayhap, too, at the recollection of the peril he had run into, and had ne’er a word on the nail. {70a}

The bowels of Sir Thomas waxed tenderer and tenderer; and he opened his lips in this fashion:-

“Stripling!  I would now communicate unto thee, on finding thee docile and assentaneous, the instruction thou needest on the signification of the words natural cause, if thy duty toward thy neighbour had been first instilled into thee.”

Whereupon Master Silas did interpose, for the dinner hour was drawing nigh.

“We cannot do all at once,” quoth he.  “Coming out of order, it might harm him.  Malt before hops, the world over, or the beer muddies.”

But Sir Thomas was not to be pricked out of his form even by so shrewd a pricker; and like unto one who heareth not, he continued to look most graciously on the homely vessel that stood ready to receive his wisdom.

“Thy mind,” said he, “being unprepared for higher cogitations, and the groundwork and religious duty not being well rammer-beaten and flinted, I do pass over this supererogatory point, and inform thee rather, that bucks and swans and herons have something in their very names announcing them of knightly appurtenance; and (God forfend that evil do ensue therefrom!) that a goose on the common, or a game-cock on the loft of a cottager or villager, may be seized, bagged, and abducted, with far less offence to the laws.  In a buck there is something so gainly and so grand, he treadeth the earth with such ease and such agility, he abstaineth from all other animals with such punctilious avoidance, one would imagine God created him when he created knighthood.  In the swan there is such purity, such coldness is there in the element he inhabiteth, such solitude of station, that verily he doth remind me of the Virgin Queen herself.  Of the heron I have less to say, not having him about me; but I never heard his lordly croak without the conceit that it resembled a chancellor’s or a primate’s.