there he stood in his boots. Mattock and shovel made short work of it;
twenty feet of superincumbent mould pressed down alike the saint and
the sinner. "Now sing a requiem who list!" said the Baron, and his
lordship went back to his oysters.

The vassals at Castle Shurland were astounded, or, as the Seneschal
Hugh better expressed it, "perfectly conglomerated," by this event.
What! murder a monk in the odor of sanctity--and on consecrated ground
too! They trembled for the health of the Baron's soul. To the
unsophisticated many, it seemed that matters could not have been much
worse had he shot a bishop's coach-horse--all looked for some signal
judgment. The melancholy catastrophe of their neighbors at Canterbury
was yet rife in their memories; no two centuries had elapsed since
those miserable sinners had cut off the tail of the blessed St.
Thomas's mule. The tail of the mule, it was well known, had been
forthwith affixed to that of the Mayor; and rumor said it had since
been hereditary in the corporation. The least that could be expected
was, that Sir Robert should have a friar tacked on to his for the term
of his natural life! Some bolder spirits there were, 'tis true, who
viewed the matter in various lights, according to their different
temperaments and dispositions; for perfect unanimity existed not even
in the good old time. The verderer, roistering Hob Roebuck, swore
roundly, "'Twere as good a deed as to eat, to kick down the chapel as
well as the monk." Hob had stood there in a white sheet for kissing
Giles Miller's daughter. On the other hand, Simpkin Agnew, the bell-
ringer, doubted if the devil's cellar, which runs under the bottomless
abyss, were quite deep enough for the delinquent, and speculated on the
probability of a hole being dug in it for his especial accommodation.
The philosophers and economists thought, with Saunders McBullock, the
Baron's bagpiper, that a 'feckless monk more or less was nae great