Page:The Chronicle of Clemendy.pdf/198

 figures, but the tallies had no more comfort in them than the rolls since the bills of debt were too strong for anything. In the midst of all this ink, parchment, and law-latin, Roger grew very sad, for he was not a good clerk, and did not like to see how fast Master Hierome's enormous quill leapt and flickered over the parchment, as if it were a bird of ravine; and it seemed to him that a man who wrote so quickly could not be good for any respectable family, in the which conjecture he may not have been far from the truth. And though the chaplain tried to ease his heart with comfortable and pious allusions to a fiery furnace, he got to feel quite down in the mouth, especially when a long bright ray of sunlight shot through the lattice and lighted on the municipal and forensic nose of Master Hierome Jessaye, showing a few flaws and patches of faulty colour on this grand member, for one cannot expect to be good all round, and the carnations of the man-at-law, were, it must be confessed, miserably blotched. Then Sir Roger would fall to making comparisons (impertinent as I conceive) between this nose and other noses he knew something about, especially the nose of dark eyed Maud, with whom he was said to be on very friendly terms. And by some Cervical Capitulary or Notional Law, the nature of which you will find fully explained in Aristotle, Alexander Aphrodisiensis, Plotinus and other learned clerks, nose led him to eyes, eyes to cheeks, cheeks to lips, and so on, and so on; till he was deep in the consideration of privileges, quit-rents, and tolls entirely different from those