if not, why, the model at all risks. Serve me in this."

"And thou wilt teach me the last tricks of the cards, and thy great
art of making phantoms glide by on the wall?"

"Bring the model intact, and I will teach thee more, Graul,--the dead
man's candle, and the charm of the newt; and I'll give thee, to boot,
the Gaul of the parricide that thou hast prayed me so oft for. Hum!
thou hast a girl in thy troop who hath a blinking eye that well
pleases me; but go now, and obey me. Work before play, and grace
before pudding!"

The tymbestere nodded, snapped her fingers in the air, and humming no
holy ditty, returned to the house through the doorway.

This short conference betrays to the reader the relations, mutually
advantageous, which subsisted between the conjuror and the
tymbesteres. Their troop (the mothers, perchance, of the generation
we treat of) had been familiar to the friar in his old capacity of
mountebank, or tregetour, and in his clerical and courtly elevation,
he did not disdain an ancient connection that served him well with the
populace; for these grim children of vice seemed present in every
place, where pastime was gay, or strife was rampant,--in peace, at the
merry-makings and the hostelries; in war, following the camp, and
seen, at night, prowling through the battlefields to dispatch the
wounded and to rifle the slain: in merrymaking, hostelry, or in camp,
they could thus still spread the fame of Friar Bungey, and uphold his
repute both for terrible lore and for hearty love of the commons.

Nor was this all; both tymbesteres and conjuror were fortune-tellers