was fat and
sleek, with a loud voice and the air of a man who is not to be gainsaid.

"Come hither, good youth," he cried, "come hither! _Vultus ingenui
puer_. Heed not the face of my good coz here. _Foenum habet in cornu_,
as Don Horace has it; but I warrant him harmless for all that."

"Stint your bull's bellowing!" exclaimed the other. "If it come to
Horace, I have a line in my mind: _Loquaces si sapiat_----How doth it
run? The English o't being that a man of sense should ever avoid a great
talker. That being so, if all were men of sense then thou wouldst be a
lonesome man, coz."

"Alas! Dicon, I fear that your logic is as bad as your philosophy or
your divinity--and God wot it would be hard to say a worse word than
that for it. For, hark ye: granting, _propter argumentum_, that I am a
talker, then the true reasoning runs that since all men of sense should
avoid me, and thou hast not avoided me, but art at the present moment
eating herrings with me under a holly-bush, ergo you are no man of
sense, which is exactly what I have been dinning into your long ears
ever since I first clapped eyes on your sunken chops."

"Tut, tut!" cried the other. "Your tongue goes like the clapper of
a mill-wheel. Sit down here, friend, and partake of this herring.
Understand first, however, that there are certain conditions attached to
it."

"I had hoped," said Alleyne, falling into the humor of the twain, "that
a tranchoir of bread and a draught of milk might be attached to it."

"Hark to him, hark to him!" cried the little fat man. "It is even thus,
Dicon! Wit, lad, is a catching thing, like the itch or the sweating
sickness. I exude it round me; it is an aura. I tell you, coz, that no
man can come within seventeen feet of me without catching a spark. Look
at your own case. A duller man never stepped, and yet within the week
you have said three things which might pass, and one thing the day we
left Fordingbridge which I should not have been ashamed of myself."

"Enough, rattle-pate, enough!" said the other. "The milk you shall have
and the bread also, friend, together with the herring, but you must hold
the scales between us."

"If he hold the herring he holds the scales, my sapient brother," cried
the fat man. "But I pray you, good youth, to tell us whether you are a
learned clerk, and, if so, whether you have studied at Oxenford or at
Paris."

"I have some small stock of learning," Alleyne answered, picking at his
herring