"What age dost thou deem me?"

"Marry," quoth the friar, "an' I had not seen thee on thy mother's
knee when she followed my stage of tregetour, I should have guessed
thee for thirty; but thou hast led too jolly a life to look still in
the blossom. Why speer'st thou the question?"

"Because when trooper and ribaud say to me, 'Graul, thou art too worn
and too old to drink of our cup and sit in the lap, to follow the
young fere to the battle, and weave the blithe dance in the fair,' I
would depart from my sisters, and have a hut of my own, and a black
cat without a white hair, and steal herbs by the new moon, and bones
from the charnel, and curse those whom I hate, and cleave the misty
air on a besom, like Mother Halkin of Edmonton. Ha, ha! Master, thou
shalt present me then to the Sabbat. Graul has the mettle for a bonny
witch!"

The tymbestere vanished with a laugh. The friar muttered a
paternoster for once, perchance, devoutly, and after having again
deliberately scanned the disjecta membra of the Eureka, gravely took
forth a duck's egg from his cupboard, and applied the master-agent of
the machine which Warner hoped was to change the face of the globe to
the only practical utility it possessed to the mountebank's
comprehension.




CHAPTER V.