"Did you hear it boil?" I laughed, as I handed back the empty tankard.

"Like your father," he said hopelessly. "But your father lived to learn
better, which I doubt you will do."

"He got a stomach affliction," I devilled, "so that one mouthful of
spirits turned it outside in. It were wisdom not to drink when one's
tank will not hold the drink."

While we talked Pons was gathering to my bedside my clothes for the day.

"Drink on, my master," he answered. "It won't hurt you. You'll die with
a sound stomach."

"You mean mine is an iron-lined stomach?" I wilfully misunderstood him.

"I mean--" he began with a quick peevishness, then broke off as he
realized my teasing and with a pout of his withered lips draped my new
sable cloak upon a chair-back. "Eight hundred ducats," he sneered. "A
thousand goats and a hundred fat oxen in a coat to keep you warm. A
score of farms on my gentleman's fine back."

"And in that a hundred fine farms, with a castle or two thrown in, to say
nothing, perhaps, of a palace," I said, reaching out my hand and touching
the rapier which he was just in the act of depositing on the chair.

"So your father won with his good right arm," Pons retorted. "But what
your father won he held."

Here Pons paused to hold up to scorn my new scarlet satin doublet--a
wondrous thing of which I had been extravagant.

"Sixty ducats for that," Pons indicted. "Your father'd have seen all the
tailors and Jews of Christendom roasting in hell before he'd a-paid such
a price."

And while we dressed--that is, while Pons helped me to dress--I continued
to quip with him.

"It is quite clear, Pons, that you have not heard the news," I said
slyly.

Whereat up pricked his ears like the old gossip he was.

"Late news?" he queried. "Mayhap from the English Court?"

"Nay," I shook my head. "But news perhaps to you, but old news for all
of that. Have you not heard? The philosophers of Greece were whispering
it nigh two thousand years ago. It is because of that news that I put
twenty fat farms on my back, live at Court, and am become a dandy. You
see, Pons, the world is a most evil place, life is most sad, all men die,
and, being dead . . . well, are dead. Wherefore, to escape the evil and
the sadness, men in these days, like me, seek amazement, insensibility,
and the madnesses of dalliance."

"But the news, master? What did the philosophers whisper about so long
ago?"

"That God was dead, Pons,