As Mary Antony shuffled slowly from the shadow into the sunshine, a gay
little flutter of wings preceded her, and a robin perched upon the
parapet behind the stone seat upon which it was the lay-sister's custom
to await the sound of the turning of the key in the lock of the heavy
door beneath the cloisters.

"Thou good-for-nothing imp!" exclaimed Mary Antony, her old face
crinkling with delight. "Thou little vain man, in thy red jerkin!
Beshrew thine impudence, intruding into a place where women alone do
dwell, and no male thing may enter. I would have thee take warning by
the fate of the baker's boy, who dared to climb into a tree, so that he
might peep over the wall and spy upon the holy Ladies in their garden.
Boasting afterward of that which he had done, and making merry over
that which he pretended to have seen, our great Lord Bishop heard of
it, and sent and took that baker's boy, and though he cried for mercy,
swearing the whole tale was an empty boast, they put out his bold eyes
with heated tongs, and hanged him from the very branches he had
climbed. They'd do the like to thee, thou little vain man, if Mary
Antony reported on thy ways. Wouldst like to hang, in thy red doublet?"

The robin had heard this warning tale many times already, told by old
Mary Antony with infinite variety.

Sometimes the tongue of the baker's boy was cut out at the roots;
sometimes he lost his ears, or again, he was tied to a cart-tail, and
flogged through the Tything. Often he became a pieman, and once he was
a turnspit in the household of the Lord Bishop himself. But, whatever
the preliminaries, and whether baker, pieman, or turnspit, his final
catastrophe was always the same: he was hanged from a bough of the very
tree into which, impious and greatly daring, he had climbed.