his world, who deemed that he did but
beguile our eyes by craft and sleight-of-hand.

This other hellish art he had, by direct inspiration, as I hold, of his
master Behemoth, that he could throw his voice whither he would, so that,
in all seeming, it came from above, or from below, or from a corner of a
room, fashioning it to resemble the voice of whom he would, yet none
might see his lips move. With this craft he would affray the peasants
about the fire in the little inns where we sometimes rested, when he
would be telling tales of bogles and eldritch fantasies, and of fiends
that rout and rap, and make the tables and firkins dance. Such art of
speech, I am advised, is spoken of by St. Jerome, in his comment on the
holy prophet the saint Isaiah, and they that use it he calls
"ventriloqui," in the Latin, or "belly-speakers," and he takes an
unfavourable sense of them and their doings. So much I have from the
learned William de Boyis, Prior of Pluscarden, where now I write; with
whom I have conversed of these matters privately, and he thinks this art
a thing that men may learn by practice, without dealing in nigromancy and
the black magic. This question I am content to leave, as is fitting, to
the judgment of my superiors. And indeed, as at that time, Brother
Thomas spake not in his belly except to make sport and affray the simple
people, soon turning their fears to mirth. Certainly the country folk
never misdoubted him, the women for a holy man, the men for a good
fellow; though all they of his own cloth shrank from him, and I have seen
them cross themselves in his presence, but to no avail. He would say a
word or two in their ears, and they straightway left the place where he
might be. None the less, with his tales and arts, Brother Thomas
commonly so wrought that we seldom slept "a la belle etoile" in that
bitter spring weather, but we ordinarily had leave to lie by the hearth,
and got a supper and a breakfast. The good peasants would find their hen-
roosts the poorer often, for all that he could snap up was to him fortune
of war.

I loved these manners little, but leave him I could not. His eye was
ever on me; if I stirred in the night he was awake and watching me, and
by day he never let me out of a bolt's flight. To cut the string of his
wicked weapon was a thought often in my mind, but he was too vigilant. My
face was his passport, he said; my face, indeed, being innocent enough,
as was no shame to me