to the stocks,
the which I should have done with joy, and been glad to find some one
on whom to wreak my wrongs. But when I came to the spot where I had left
him, I found that fate had befriended him by the hand of a fool, for
there was no Spaniard but only the village idiot, Billy Minns by name,
who stood staring first at the tree to which the foreigner had been made
fast, and then at a piece of silver in his hand.

'Where is the man who was tied here, Billy?' I asked.

'I know not, Master Thomas,' he answered in his Norfolk talk which I
will not set down. 'Half-way to wheresoever he was going I should say,
measured by the pace at which he left when once I had set him upon his
horse.'

'You set him on his horse, fool? How long was that ago?'

'How long! Well, it might be one hour, and it might be two. I'm no
reckoner of time, that keeps its own score like an innkeeper, without
my help. Lawks! how he did gallop off, working those long spurs he wore
right into the ribs of the horse. And little wonder, poor man, and he
daft, not being able to speak, but only to bleat sheeplike, and fallen
upon by robbers on the king's roads, and in broad daylight. But Billy
cut him loose and caught his horse and set him on it, and got this piece
for his good charity. Lawks! but he was glad to be gone. How he did
gallop!'

'Now you are a bigger fool even than I thought you, Billy Minns,' I said
in anger. 'That man would have murdered me, I overcame him and made him
fast, and you have let him go.'

'He would have murdered you, Master, and you made him fast! Then why did
you not stop to keep him till I came along, and we would have haled him
to the stocks? That would have been sport and all. You call me fool--but
if you found a man covered with blood and hurts tied to a tree, and he
daft and not able to speak, had you not cut him loose? Well, he's gone,
and this alone is left of him,' and he spun the piece into the air.

Now, seeing that there was reason in Billy's talk, for the fault was
mine, I turned away without more words, not straight homewards, for I
wished to think alone awhile on all that had come about between me and
Lily and her father, but down the way which runs across the lane to the
crest of the Vineyard Hills. These hills are clothed with underwood,
in which large oaks grow to within some two hundred yards of this house
where I write, and this underwood is pierced by paths that my mother
laid out, for she loved to wa