hat Dick's ideas, if not carefully handled, might get so
entangled and confused that he would be unable to give any
intelligible account of the matter. He therefore addressed him
coaxingly as follows--

"Nay, nay, Dickon, thou hast not; answer me now, and thou shalt have
the fat from the roast to-morrow, and a sop to season it withal."

Dick leered again at this prospective dainty, as he replied--

"I tou'd ye, and ye heeded not, belike; and who's the fool now? Come,
I'll set you my riddle again. If ye set your back to a door, see that
it be tyned, or ye may get a broken head, and then"----

Here he paused, and looked round with a vacant eye; but they wisely
forbore to interrupt the current of his ideas, hoping that ere long
they might trickle into the right channel.

"There was a big room, and a bed in it," he continued, "and a priest,
which the fule body has cheated. A fule's wit is worth more nor a wise
man's folly."

A vague apprehension of the truth crossed the abbot's mind. Being now
on the right scent, he no longer forbore to follow up the chase, but
endeavoured to hasten the development by a gentle stimulating of his
pace in the required direction.

"The priest yonder at the castle gave it thee?" said the abbot
carelessly.

"Well, and if he did," replied Dick sharply, "he didna ken I was
a-peeping into his chamber, as I've done many an unlucky time here in
the abbey, and gotten a good licking for my pains."

"To whom was it sent?"

"Ask the bairn yon', that I ha' brought by th' scut o' th' neck. He
woudna come bout tugging for."

"Was he the messenger?" asked Roger, the abbot's secretary and prime
agent.

"Help thine ignorant face, father!--I was peeping about, you see, in
the dark. The priest thought it waur the laddy yonder, a-comin' for
his bag; so he gied it me, and tou'd me to carry it safe, but forgot
to grease my pate forbye wi' the direction. I ken'd ye could read
aught at the abbey here, and so ye may e'en run wi' it to the right
owner for yere pains."

The cunning knave glossed over his treachery with this excuse; for he
evidently knew better, and had a notion that he should serve his
masters by this piece of diplomatic craft.

"Thou mayest depart, and ere morrow we will give thee a largess for
thy dexterity."

Dick did not care to be long a-snuffing the chill air of the vaults
and passages after his dismissal, but in a warm cell near the kitchen
fire he was soon wrapped in the del