's guard--always in the little stone guard cell of the gateway
at nights; because, in fact, the young man's whole faculties were set
upon seeing that Thomas Culpepper did not pass unseen through the
gate, it was four days before the gatewarden contrived to get himself
asked why he would have spat in the dust or cast his hat on high. It
was, as it were, a point of honour that he should be asked for all the
information that he gave; and he thirsted to tell his tale.

His tale had it that he had been ruined by a wench who had thrown her
shoe over the mill and married a horse-smith, after having many times
tickled the rough chin of Nicholas Hogben. Therefore, he had it that
all women were to be humbled and held down--for all women were
traitors, praters, liars, worms and vermin. (He made a great play of
words between wermen, meaning worms, and wermin and wummin.) He had
been ruined by this woman who had tickled him under the chin--that
being an ingratiating act, fit to bewitch and muddle a man, like as if
she had promised him marriage. And then she had married a horse-smith!
So he was ready and willing, and prayed every night that God would
send him the chance, to ruin and hold down every woman who walked the
earth or lay in a bed.

But he had been ruined, too, by Thomas Culpepper, who had sold Durford
and Maintree and Sallowford--which last was Hogben's father's farm.
For why? Selling the farm had let in a Lincoln lawyer, and the Lincoln
lawyer had set the farm to sheep, which last had turned old Hogben,
the father, out from his furrows to die in a ditch--there being no
room for farmers and for sheep upon one land. It had sent old Hogben,
the father, to die in a ditch; it had sent his daughters to the stews
and his sons to the road for sturdy beggars. So that, but for
Wallop's band passing that way when Hogben was grinning through the
rope beneath Lincoln town tree--but for the fact that men were needed
for Wallop's work in Calais, by the holy blood of Hailes! Hogben would
have been rating the angel's head in Paradise.

But there had been great call for men to man the walls there in
Calais, so Wallop's ancient had written his name down on the list,
beneath the gallows tree, and had taken him away from the Sheriff of
Lincoln's man.

'So here a be,' he drawled, 'cutting little holes in my pikehead.'

''Tis a folly,' the young Poins said.

'Sir,' the Lincolnshire man answered, 'you say 'tis a folly to make
small holes