"We are not unacquainted," said I, with my lips to the keyhole.
"The more reason you should stay without," said he, and I could hear him beat his pillow flat, and turn over heavily upon his side.
"Hast thou forgot my sword so soon?" cried I in a great resentment that the victor should be pleading thus at the chamber door of the vanquished.
"Go, hack with thy tongue, Thersites!" came the voice again; but at that I waited no further, but burst in. I had got scarce two paces over the threshold when—
"Why, Master Jordan!" I cried out, for there on the bed lay my ancient fat friend, his heavy Warham-face peering above the quilt, a tasselled nightcap bobbing over his nose, and all else of him (and of the furniture too) hid and o'erlaid by a very locust-swarm of folios.
At the first sight of me I thought he would have called upon the mountains to bury him, from mere shame of his discovery.
"Away!" he gasped, when he could get breath to say it; "away, graceless child! I am no foiner; I know you not. I am a man of peace, a reverend doctor. My trade is in books. Impallesco chartis; I grow pallid with conning upon the written word. What be your armies and your invasions and your marchings to and fro? that lives should be lived, and brains spent and lost therein. I tell you, one verse of Catullus shall outweigh the clatter of a battalion, and Tully is the only sergeant I salute." And so, having hurled his defiance, he sank back amongst the bed clothes and drew down his nightcap an inch lower upon his brow.
"You know me very well, good doctor," quoth I, and advanced to his bedside, which was fortified with an huge vallum of the Consolations. "I am Denis Cleeve."
"'Tis like enough," said the old man with an air of infinite resignation, and affecting still not to know me. "And I am my lord of Pembroke's poor librarian, and at this time somewhat deeply engaged upon the duties attaching to that service."
He drew forth a volume with a trembling hand as he spoke, and made as if to consult it.