spoiling your appetite with strong ale?
Better have tried sack, lad; have some now with me."

And the worthy old gentleman, having finished his oration, settled
himself on a great bench inside the chimney, and put his hawk on a perch
over his head, while his cockers coiled themselves up close to the warm
peat-ashes, and his son set to work to pull off his father's boots, amid
sundry warnings to take care of his corns.

"Come, Master Amyas, a pint of white wine and sugar, and a bit of a
shoeing-horn to it ere we dine. Some pickled prawns, now, or a rasher
off the coals, to whet you?"

"Thank you," quoth Amyas; "but I have drunk a mort of outlandish
liquors, better and worse, in the last three years, and yet never found
aught to come up to good ale, which needs neither shoeing-horn before
nor after, but takes care of itself, and of all honest stomachs too, I
think."

"You speak like a book, boy," said old Cary; "and after all, what a
plague comes of these newfangled hot wines, and aqua vitaes, which have
come in since the wars, but maddening of the brains, and fever of the
blood?"

"I fear we have not seen the end of that yet," said Frank. "My friends
write me from the Netherlands that our men are falling into a swinish
trick of swilling like the Hollanders. Heaven grant that they may not
bring home the fashion with them."

"A man must drink, they say, or die of the ague, in those vile swamps,"
said Amyas. "When they get home here, they will not need it."

"Heaven grant it," said Frank; "I should be sorry to see Devonshire
a drunken county; and there are many of our men out there with Mr.
Champernoun."

"Ah," said Cary, "there, as in Ireland, we are proving her majesty's
saying true, that Devonshire is her right hand, and the young children
thereof like the arrows in the hand of the giant."

"They may well be," said his son, "when some of them are giants
themselves, like my tall school-fellow opposite."

"He will be up and doing again presently, I'll warrant him," said old
Cary.

"And that I shall," quoth Amyas. "I have been devising brave deeds;
and see in the distance enchanters to be bound, dragons choked, empires
conquered, though not in Holland."

"You do?" asked Will, a little sharply; for he had had a half suspicion
that more was meant than met the ear.

"Yes," said Amyas, turning off his jest again, "I go to what Raleigh
calls the Land of the Nymphs. Another month, I hope, will see me abroad
in I