ogism, attack and refutation. Question
clattered upon answer like a sword on a buckler. The ancients, the
fathers of the Church, the moderns, the Scriptures, the Arabians, were
each sent hurtling against the other, while the rain still dripped and
the dark holly-leaves glistened with the moisture. At last the fat man
seemed to weary of it, for he set to work quietly upon his meal, while
his opponent, as proud as the rooster who is left unchallenged upon the
midden, crowed away in a last long burst of quotation and deduction.
Suddenly, however, his eyes dropped upon his food, and he gave a howl of
dismay.

"You double thief!" he cried, "you have eaten my herrings, and I without
bite or sup since morning."

"That," quoth the other complacently, "was my final argument, my
crowning effort, or _peroratio_, as the orators have it. For, coz, since
all thoughts are things, you have but to think a pair of herrings, and
then conjure up a pottle of milk wherewith to wash them down."

"A brave piece of reasoning," cried the other, "and I know of but one
reply to it." On which, leaning forward, he caught his comrade a rousing
smack across his rosy cheek. "Nay, take it not amiss," he said, "since
all things are but thoughts, then that also is but a thought and may be
disregarded."

This last argument, however, by no means commended itself to the pupil
of Ockham, who plucked a great stick from the ground and signified his
dissent by smiting the realist over the pate with it. By good fortune,
the wood was so light and rotten that it went to a thousand splinters,
but Alleyne thought it best to leave the twain to settle the matter at
their leisure, the more so as the sun was shining brightly once
more. Looking back down the pool-strewn road, he saw the two excited
philosophers waving their hands and shouting at each other, but their
babble soon became a mere drone in the distance, and a turn in the road
hid them from his sight.

And now after passing Holmesley Walk and the Wooton Heath, the forest
began to shred out into scattered belts of trees, with gleam of
corn-field and stretch of pasture-land between. Here and there by the
wayside stood little knots of wattle-and-daub huts with shock-haired
laborers lounging by the doors and red-cheeked children sprawling in
the roadway. Back among the groves he could see the high gable ends and
thatched roofs of the franklins' houses, on whose fields these men found
employment, or more often