the well-spread board of the White Hart for the meal after the
market. They were a motley company. By the host's side sat a
knight on his way home from pilgrimage to Compostella, or perhaps a
mission to Spain, with a couple of squires and other attendants, and
converse of political import seemed to be passing between him and a
shrewd-looking man in a lawyer's hood and gown, the recorder of
Winchester, who preferred being a daily guest at the White Hart to
keeping a table of his own. Country franklins and yeomen, merchants
and men-at-arms, palmers and craftsmen, friars and monks, black,
white, and grey, and with almost all, Father Shoveller had greeting
or converse to exchange. He knew everybody, and had friendly talk
with all, on canons or crops, on war or wool, on the prices of pigs
or prisoners, on the news of the country side, or on the perilous
innovations in learning at Oxford, which might, it was feared, even
affect St. Mary's College at Winchester.

He did not affect outlandish fishes himself, and dined upon pike,
but observing the curiosity of his guests, he took good care to have
them well supplied with grampus; also in due time with varieties of
the pudding and cake kind which had never dawned on their forest-
bred imagination, and with a due proportion of good ale--the same
over which the knight might be heard rejoicing, and lauding far
above the Spanish or French wines, on which he said he had been half
starved.

Father Shoveller mused a good deal over his pike and its savoury
stuffing. He was not by any means an ideal monk, but he was equally
far from being a scandal. He was the shrewd man of business and
manager of his fraternity, conducting the farming operations and
making all the bargains, following his rule respectably according to