lay spread before them like a
picture of peace, studded with blossoming orchards and girdled with
spring. Northward the forest of Arden clad the rolling hills. Southward
the fields of Feldon stretched away to the blue knolls beyond which lay
Oxford and Northamptonshire. The ragged stretches of Snitterfield downs
scrambled away to the left; and on the right, beyond Bearley, were the
wooded uplands where Guy of Warwick and Heraud of Arden slew the wild ox
and the boar. And down through the midst ran the Avon southward, like a
silver ribbon slipped through Kendal green, to where the Stour comes
down, past Luddington, to Bidford, and away to the misty hills.

"Why," exclaimed the master-player--"why, upon my word, it is a fair
town--as fair a town as the heart of man could wish. Wish? I wish 't
were sunken in the sea, with all its pack of fools! Why," said he,
turning wrathfully upon Nick, "that old Sir Thingumbob of thine, down
there, called me a caterpillar on the kingdom of England, a vagabond,
and a common player of interludes! Called me vagabond! Me! Why, I have
more good licenses than he has wits. And as to Master Bailiff Stubbes, I
have permits to play from more justices of the peace than he can shake a
stick at in a month of Sundays!" He shook his fist wrathfully at the
distant town, and gnawed his mustache until one side pointed up and the
other down. "But, hark 'e, boy, I'll have my vengeance on them all--ay,
that will I, upon my word, and on the remnant of mine honour--or else my
name's not Gaston Carew!"

"Is it true, sir," asked Nick, hesitatingly, "that they despitefully
handled you?"

"With their tongues, ay," said Carew, bitterly; "but not otherwise." He
clapped his hand upon his poniard, and threw back his head defiantly.
"They dared not come to blows--they knew my kind! Yet John Shakspere is
no bad sort--he knoweth what is what. But Master Bailiff Stubbes, I
ween, is a long-eared thing that brays for thistles. I'll thistle him!
He called Will Shakspere rogue. Hast ever looked through a red glass?"

"Nay," said Nick.

"Well, it turns the whole world red. And so it is with Master Stubbes.
He looks through a pair of rogue's eyes and sees the whole world rogue.
Why, boy," cried the master-player, vehemently, "he thought to buy my
tongue! Marry, if tongues were troubles he has bought himself a peck!
What! Buy my silence? Nay, he'll see a deadly flash of silence when I
come to my Lord the Admiral again!"