unfavourable sense of them and their doings. So much I have from the
learned William de Boyis, Prior of Pluscarden, where now I write; with
whom I have conversed of these matters privately, and he thinks this art
a thing that men may learn by practice, without dealing in nigromancy and
the black magic. This question I am content to leave, as is fitting, to
the judgment of my superiors. And indeed, as at that time, Brother
Thomas spake not in his belly except to make sport and affray the simple
people, soon turning their fears to mirth. Certainly the country folk
never misdoubted him, the women for a holy man, the men for a good
fellow; though all they of his own cloth shrank from him, and I have seen
them cross themselves in his presence, but to no avail. He would say a
word or two in their ears, and they straightway left the place where he
might be. None the less, with his tales and arts, Brother Thomas
commonly so wrought that we seldom slept "a la belle etoile" in that
bitter spring weather, but we ordinarily had leave to lie by the hearth,
and got a supper and a breakfast. The good peasants would find their hen-
roosts the poorer often, for all that he could snap up was to him fortune
of war.

I loved these manners little, but leave him I could not. His eye was
ever on me; if I stirred in the night he was awake and watching me, and
by day he never let me out of a bolt's flight. To cut the string of his
wicked weapon was a thought often in my mind, but he was too vigilant. My
face was his passport, he said; my face, indeed, being innocent enough,
as was no shame to me, but an endless cause of mirth and mockery to him.
Yet, by reason of the serviceableness of the man in that perilous
country, and my constant surprise and wonder at what he did and said, and
might do next (which no man could guess beforehand), and a kind of
foolish pride in his very wickedness, so much beyond what I had ever
dreamed of, and for pure fear of him also, I found myself following with