this?"

I smiled: "Why then do they live?" said I.

Even in the white moonlight I saw his face flush, and he cried out in a
great voice, "To do great deeds or to repent them that they ever were
born." "Yea," said I, "they live to live because the world liveth." He
stretched out his hand to me and grasped mine, but said no more; and
went on till we came to the door in the rood-screen; then he turned to
me with his hand on the ring-latch, and said, "Hast thou seen many dead
men?"

"Nay, but few," said I.

"And I a many," said he; "but come now and look on these, our friends
first and then our foes, so that ye may not look to see them while we
sit and talk of the days that are to be on the earth before the Day of
Doom cometh."

So he opened the door, and we went into the chancel; a light burned on
the high altar before the host, and looked red and strange in the
moonlight that came through the wide traceried windows unstained by the
pictures and beflowerings of the glazing; there were new stalls for the
priests and vicars where we entered, carved more abundantly and
beautifully than any of the woodwork I had yet seen, and everywhere was
rich and fair colour and delicate and dainty form. Our dead lay just
before the high altar on low biers, their faces all covered with linen
cloths, for some of them had been sore smitten and hacked in the fray.
We went up to them and John Ball took the cloth from the face of one;
he had been shot to the heart with a shaft and his face was calm and
smooth. He had been a young man fair and comely, with hair flaxen
almost to whiteness; he lay there in his clothes as he had fallen, the
hands crossed over his breast and holding a rush cross. His bow lay on
one side of him, his quiver of shafts and his sword on the other.

John Ball spake to me while he held the corner of the sheet: "What
sayest thou, scholar? feelest thou sorrow of heart when thou lookest on
this, either for the man himself, or for thyself and the time when thou
shalt be as he is?"

I said, "Nay, I feel no sorrow for this; for the man is not here: this
is an empty house, and the master has gone from it. Forsooth, this to
me is but as a waxen image of a man; nay, not even that, for if it were
an image, it would be an image of the man as he was when he was alive.
But here is no life nor semblance of life, and I am not moved by it;
nay, I am more moved by the man's clothes and war-gear--there is more
life in them than