anet Mars--the Lord of War. I would show you him, but he's too near
his setting. Rats and mice, doing their businesses by night, come under
the dominion of our Lady the Moon. Now between Mars and Luna, the one
red, t'other white, the one hot, t'other cold and so forth, stands, as I
have told you, a natural antipathy, or, as you say, hatred. Which
antipathy their creatures do inherit. Whence, good people, you may both
see and hear your cattle stamp in their stalls for the self-same causes
as decree the passages of the stars across the unalterable face of
Heaven! Ahem!'

Puck lay along chewing a leaf. They felt him shake with laughter, and
Mr. Culpeper sat up stiffly.

'I myself,' said he, 'have saved men's lives, and not a few neither, by
observing at the proper time--there is a time, mark you, for all things
under the sun--by observing, I say, so small a beast as a rat in
conjunction with so great a matter as this dread arch above us.' He
swept his hand across the sky. 'Yet there are those,' he went on sourly,
'who have years without knowledge.'

'Right,' said Puck. 'No fool like an old fool.'

Mr. Culpeper wrapped his cloak round him and sat still while the
children stared at the Great Bear on the hill-top.

'Give him time,' Puck whispered behind his hand. 'He turns like a
timber-tug--all of a piece.'

'Ahem!' Mr. Culpeper said suddenly. 'I'll prove it to you. When I was
physician to Saye's Horse, and fought the King--or rather the man
Charles Stuart--in Oxfordshire (I had _my_ learning at Cambridge), the
plague was very hot all around us. I saw it at close hands. He who says
I am ignorant of the plague, for example, is altogether beside the
bridge.'

'We grant it,' said Puck solemnly. 'But why talk of the plague this rare
night?'

'To prove my argument. This Oxfordshire plague, good people, being
generated among rivers and ditches, was of a werish, watery nature.
Therefore it was curable by drenching the patient in cold water, and
laying him in wet cloths; or at least, so I cured some of them. Mark
this. It bears on what shall come after.'

'Mark also, Nick,' said Puck, 'that we are not your College of
Physicians, but only a lad and a lass and a poor lubberkin. Therefore be
plain, old Hyssop on the Wall!'

'To be plain and in order with you, I was shot in the chest while
gathering of betony from a brookside near Thame, and was took by the
King's men before their Colonel, one Blagg or Bragge, whom I warned