f his narrative
may be acceptable:--

Once upon a time in Flanders there was a company of young men, who gave
themselves up to every kind of dissipation and debauchery--haunting the
taverns where dancing and dicing continues day and night, eating and
drinking, and serving the devil in his own temple by their outrageous
life of luxury. It was horrible to hear their oaths, how they tore to
pieces our blessed Lord's body, as if they thought the Jews had not
rent Him enough; and each laughed at the sin of the others, and all
were alike immersed in gluttony and wantonness.

And so one morning it befel that three of these rioters were sitting
over their drink in a tavern, long before the bell had rung for nine
o'clock prayers. And as they sat, they heard a bell clinking before a
corpse that was being carried to the grave. So one of them bade his
servant-lad go and ask what was the name of the dead man; but the boy
said that he knew it already, and that it was the name of an old
companion of his master's. As he had been sitting drunk on a bench,
there had come a privy thief, whom men called Death, and who slew all
the people in this country; and he had smitten the drunken man's heart
in two with his spear, and had then gone on his way without any more
words. This Death had slain a thousand during the present pestilence;
and the boy thought it worth warning his master to beware of such an
adversary, and to be ready to meet him at any time. "So my mother
taught me; I say no more." "Marry," said the keeper of the tavern;
"the child tells the truth: this Death has slain all the inhabitants of
a great village not far from here; I think that there must be the place
where he dwells." Then the rioter swore with some of his big oaths
that he at least was not afraid of this Death, and that he would seek
him out wherever he dwelt. And at his instance his two boon-companions
joined with him in a vow that before nightfall they would slay the
false traitor Death, who was the slayer of so many; and the vow they
swore was one of closest fellowship between them--to live and die for
one another as if they had been brethren born. And so they went forth
in their drunken fury towards the village of which the taverner had
spoken, with terrible execrations on their lips that "Death should be
dead, if they might catch him."

They had not gone quite half a mile when at a stile between two fields
they came upon a poor old man, who meekly gr