ch, or
Cary's fun, or Amyas's good wine, or the nobleness which lies in every
young lad's heart, if their elders will take the trouble to call it out,
the whole party came in to terms one by one, shook hands all round, and
vowed on the hilt of Amyas's sword to make fools of themselves no more,
at least by jealousy: but to stand by each other and by their lady-love,
and neither grudge nor grumble, let her dance with, flirt with, or marry
with whom she would; and in order that the honor of their peerless dame,
and the brotherhood which was named after her, might be spread through
all lands, and equal that of Angelica or Isonde of Brittany, they would
each go home, and ask their fathers' leave (easy enough to obtain in
those brave times) to go abroad wheresoever there were "good wars," to
emulate there the courage and the courtesy of Walter Manny and Gonzalo
Fernandes, Bayard and Gaston de Foix. Why not? Sidney was the hero of
Europe at five-and-twenty; and why not they?

And Frank watched and listened with one of his quiet smiles (his eyes,
as some folks' do, smiled even when his lips were still), and only said:
"Gentlemen, be sure that you will never repent this day."

"Repent?" said Cary. "I feel already as angelical as thou lookest, Saint
Silvertongue. What was it that sneezed?--the cat?"

"The lion, rather, by the roar of it," said Amyas, making a dash at the
arras behind him. "Why, here is a doorway here! and--"

And rushing under the arras, through an open door behind, he returned,
dragging out by the head Mr. John Brimblecombe.

Who was Mr. John Brimblecombe?

If you have forgotten him, you have done pretty nearly what every one
else in the room had done. But you recollect a certain fat lad, son of
the schoolmaster, whom Sir Richard punished for tale-bearing three years
before, by sending him, not to Coventry, but to Oxford. That was the
man. He was now one-and-twenty, and a bachelor of Oxford, where he
had learnt such things as were taught in those days, with more or less
success; and he was now hanging about Bideford once more, intending to
return after Christmas and read divinity, that he might become a parson,
and a shepherd of souls in his native land.

Jack was in person exceedingly like a pig: but not like every pig: not
in the least like the Devon pigs of those days, which, I am sorry to
say, were no more shapely than the true Irish greyhound who pays
Pat's "rint" for him; or than the lanky monsters