drunken, your mothers
drunken?" At this there was a shout of horror, for mediaeval audiences
had not learned to sit mumchance at a moving sermon. "Ah, that comes
home to you," cried the friar. "What madmen! think you it doth not
more shock the all-pure God to see a man, His noblest work, turned to
a drunken beast, than it can shock you creatures of sin and unreason to
see a woman turned into a thing no better nor worse than yourselves."

He ended with two pictures: a drunkard's house and family, and a sober
man's; both so true and dramatic in all their details that the wives
fell all to "ohing" and "ahing," and "Eh, but that is a true word."

This discourse caused quite all uproar. The hearers formed knots; the
men were indignant; so the women flattered them and took their part
openly against the preacher. A married man had a right to a drop; he
needed it, working for all the family. And for their part they did not
care to change their men for milksops.

The double faces! That very evening a hand of men caught near a hundred
of them round Brother Clement, filling his wallet with the best, and
offering him the very roses off their heads, and kissing his frock, and
blessing him "for taking in hand to mend their sots."

Jerome thought this sermon too earthly.

"Drunkenness is not heresy, Clement, that a whole sermon should be
preached against it."

As they went on, he found to his surprise that Clement's sermons sank
into his hearers deeper than his own; made them listen, think, cry, and
sometimes even amend their ways. "He hath the art of sinking to their
peg," thought Jerome, "Yet he can soar high enough at times."

Upon the whole it puzzled Jerome, who had a secret sense of superiority
to his tenderer brother. And after about two hundred miles of it, it
got to displease him as well as puzzle him. But he tried to check this
sentiment as petty and unworthy. "Souls differ like locks," said he,
"and preachers must differ like keys, or the fewer should the Church
open for God to pass in. And certes, this novice hath the key to these
northern souls, being himself a northern man."

And so they came slowly down the Rhine, sometimes drifting a few miles
down the stream; but in general walking by the banks preaching, and
teaching, and confessing sinners in the towns and villages; and they
reached the town of Dusseldorf.

There was the little quay where Gerard and Denys had taken boat up the
Rhine, The friars landed on i