ld know better, since
I have heard that the monks of Beaulieu could squeeze a good cup of
wine from their own grapes. Know then that if these rows were dug up
the wealth of the country would be gone, and mayhap there would be dry
throats and gaping mouths in England, for in three months' time these
black roots will blossom and snoot and burgeon, and from them will come
many a good ship-load of Medoc and Gascony which will cross the narrow
seas. But see the church in the hollow, and the folk who cluster in the
churchyard! By my hilt! it is a burial, and there is a passing bell!"
He pulled off his steel cap as he spoke and crossed himself, with a
muttered prayer for the repose of the dead.

"There too," remarked Alleyne, as they rode on again, "that which seems
to the eye to be dead is still full of the sap of life, even as the
vines were. Thus God hath written Himself and His laws very broadly on
all that is around us, if our poor dull eyes and duller souls could but
read what He hath set before us."

"Ha! mon petit," cried the bowman, "you take me back to the days when
you were new fledged, as sweet a little chick as ever pecked his way
out of a monkish egg. I had feared that in gaining our debonair young
man-at-arms we had lost our soft-spoken clerk. In truth, I have noted
much change in you since we came from Twynham Castle."

"Surely it would be strange else, seeing that I have lived in a world
so new to me. Yet I trust that there are many things in which I have not
changed. If I have turned to serve an earthly master, and to carry arms
for an earthly king, it would be an ill thing if I were to lose all
thought of the great high King and Master of all, whose humble and
unworthy servant I was ere ever I left Beaulieu. You, John, are also
from the cloisters, but I trow that you do not feel that you have
deserted the old service in taking on the new."

"I am a slow-witted man," said John, "and, in sooth, when I try to think
about such matters it casts a gloom upon me. Yet I do not look upon
myself as a worse man in an archer's jerkin than I was in a white cowl,
if that be what you mean."

"You have but changed from one white company to the other," quoth
Aylward. "But, by these ten finger-bones! it is a passing strange thing
to me to think that it was but in the last fall of the leaf that we
walked from Lyndhurst together, he so gentle and maidenly, and you,
John, like a great red-limbed overgrown moon-calf; and now