But while I pondered all these things, and how men fight and lose the
battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of
their defeat, and when it comes turns out not to be what they meant,
and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name--
while I pondered all this, John Ball began to speak again in the same
soft and dear voice with which he had left off.

"Good fellows, it was your fellowship and your kindness that took me
out of the archbishop's prison three days agone, though God wot ye had
nought to gain by it save outlawry and the gallows; yet lacked I not
your fellowship before ye drew near me in the body, and when between
me and Canterbury street was yet a strong wall, and the turnkeys and
sergeants and bailiffs.

"For hearken, my friends and helpers; many days ago, when April was
yet young, I lay there, and the heart that I had strung up to bear all
things because of the fellowship of men and the blessed saints and the
angels and those that are, and those that are to be, this heart, that
I had strung up like a strong bow, fell into feebleness, so that I lay
there a-longing for the green fields and the white-thorn bushes and
the lark singing over the corn, and the talk of good fellows round the
ale-house bench, and the babble of the little children, and the team
on the road and the beasts afield, and all the life of earth; and I
alone all the while, near my foes and afar from my friends, mocked and
flouted and starved with cold and hunger; and so weak was my heart
that though I longed for all these things yet I saw them not, nor knew
them but as names; and I longed so sore to be gone that I chided
myself that I had once done well; and I said to myself:

"Forsooth, hadst thou kept thy tongue between thy teeth thou mightest