Page:The Chronicle of Clemendy.pdf/85

 "Sir Peter de Fontibus," answered the Rubrican, "was without doubt of our Sokage, and in point of fact was called in Cervisage Ratabus the Powt, being the same that instituted the Charter of 'Thirsty Soil', as Dick Leonard will tell you. But if he did verily contrive the joyous trumpery, the which you have so choicely narrated to us, he left no record thereof, at the least none that I have seen; nor is it in the Red Book of Rabanus. But whom do you will should come after you in devising; for it is your part to choose a tale-teller?" "The next deviser," quoth I, "shall be Master Cook, for it wants but twenty minutes to noon, and there would be no time to tell another tale. But if this affair of the clock was indeed a piece of cozenage, as I believe it was, it is surely as choice a deceit as ever sprang from the fertile soil of old Siluria." Then Dick Leonard said: "What takes me most is the Court, with all the Abbots, Priors, and Decretalists, the row of parchment scrapers, and the officers of the ecclesiastical law, sitting all through the night under the silver lamp, digesting this fantastic lump of trickery and sending it down with the strong wine of their own imaginations." "Now let's dine," said I, "and though you will not have a feast like the banquet of the monks that Spigot Clerk hath so wittily delineated for us; yet my cook is a good disguiser of raw stuff, and a man of some invention, and for your drink I have a very sufficient Rhenish wine, in the which we will give a health to the waggish memory of Ratabus, who was called the Powt."