emen, we
ought to ask his pardon. Has he not shown already more chivalry, more
self-denial, and therefore more true love, than any of us? My friends,
let the fierceness of affection, which we have used as an excuse for
many a sin of our own, excuse his listening to a conversation in which
he well deserved to bear a part."

"Ah," said Jack, "you make me one of your brotherhood; and see if I do
not dare to suffer as much as any of you! You laugh? Do you fancy none
can use a sword unless he has a baker's dozen of quarterings in his
arms, or that Oxford scholars know only how to handle a pen?"

"Let us try his metal," said St. Leger. "Here's my sword, Jack; draw,
Coffin! and have at him."

"Nonsense!" said Coffin, looking somewhat disgusted at the notion of
fighting a man of Jack's rank; but Jack caught at the weapon offered to
him.

"Give me a buckler, and have at any of you!"

"Here's a chair bottom," cried Cary; and Jack, seizing it in his left,
flourished his sword so fiercely, and called so loudly to Coffin to come
on, that all present found it necessary, unless they wished blood to be
spilt, to turn the matter off with a laugh: but Jack would not hear of
it.

"Nay: if you will let me be of your brotherhood, well and good: but if
not, one or other I will fight: and that's flat."

"You see, gentlemen," said Amyas, "we must admit him or die the death;
so we needs must go when Sir Urian drives. Come up, Jack, and take the
oaths. You admit him, gentlemen?"

"Let me but be your chaplain," said Jack, "and pray for your luck when
you're at the wars. If I do stay at home in a country curacy, 'tis not
much that you need be jealous of me with her, I reckon," said Jack, with
a pathetical glance at his own stomach.

"Sia!" said Cary: "but if he be admitted, it must be done according to
the solemn forms and ceremonies in such cases provided. Take him into
the next room, Amyas, and prepare him for his initiation."

"What's that?" asked Amyas, puzzled by the word. But judging from the
corner of Will's eye that initiation was Latin for a practical joke,
he led forth his victim behind the arras again, and waited five minutes
while the room was being darkened, till Frank's voice called to him to
bring in the neophyte.

"John Brimblecombe," said Frank, in a sepulchral tone, "you cannot be
ignorant, as a scholar and bachelor of Oxford, of that dread sacrament
by which Catiline bound the soul of his fellow-conspirators, in or