idnight strains
Under Bonnybells' window-panes.
Wait till you've come to forty year!

"Forty times over let Michaelmas pass,
Grizzling hair the brain doth clear;
Then you know a boy is an ass,
Then you know the worth of a lass,
Once you have come to forty year.

"Pledge me round, I bid ye declare,
All good fellows whose beards are gray:
Did not the fairest of the fair
Common grow, and wearisome, ere
Ever a month was passed away?

"The reddest lips that ever have kissed,
The brightest eyes that ever have shone,
May pray and whisper and we not list,
Or look away and never be missed,
Ere yet ever a month was gone.

"Gillian's dead, Heaven rest her bier,
How I loved her twenty years syne!
Marian's married, but I sit here,
Alive and merry at forty year,
Dipping my nose in the Gascon wine."

"Who taught thee that merry lay, Wamba, thou son of Witless?" roared
Athelstane, clattering his cup on the table and shouting the chorus.

"It was a good and holy hermit, sir, the pious clerk of Copmanhurst,
that you wot of, who played many a prank with us in the days that we
knew King Richard. Ah, noble sir, that was a jovial time and a good
priest."

"They say the holy priest is sure of the next bishopric, my love,"
said Rowena. "His Majesty hath taken him into much favor. My Lord of
Huntingdon looked very well at the last ball; but I never could see any
beauty in the Countess--a freckled, blowsy thing, whom they used to
call Maid Marian: though, for the matter of that, what between her
flirtations with Major Littlejohn and Captain Scarlett, really--"

"Jealous again--haw! haw!" laughed Athelstane.

"I am above jealousy, and scorn it," Rowena answered, drawing herself up
very majestically.

"Well, well, Wamba's was a good song," Athelstane said.

"Nay, a wicked song," said Rowena, turning up her eyes as usual. "What!
rail at woman's love? Prefer a filthy wine cup to a true wife?
Woman's love is eternal, my Athelstane. He who questions it would be
a blasphemer were he not a fool. The well-born and well-nurtured
gentlewoman loves once and once only."

"I pray you, madam, pardon me, I--I am not well," said the gray friar,
rising abruptly from his settle, and tottering