“Yes,” he would say, “O most Holy Saint Philip, and you, O my Lord God, if only I could turn the Low Countries into a common grave, and cast therein all the inhabitants of that country, then surely they would return to Thee, my most blessed Patron, and to Thee, my Lady Virgin Mary, and to ye, my good masters, the saints and saintesses of Paradise!”
And he really tried to do as he said; so that he was more Roman than the Pope and more Catholic than the Councils!
And the people of Flanders and of the Low Countries began to grow anxious again, and to think that they could discern in the distance this crowned spider, working in the sombre house of the Escurial, reaching out his long claws with their nippers open, and spreading wide the web in which he might enwrap them all and suck them white of their blood.
Ulenspiegel, for his part, went spreading the alarm wherever he could, and stirring up the people against the ravishers of his country and the murderers of his parents.
One day, therefore, when he was in the Marché du Vendredi, near by the Dulle-Griet—the Great Canon—Ulenspiegel lay flat down on his stomach in the middle of the road. A charcoal-burner who happened to be passing came up and asked him what he was doing there.
“I am giving my nose a wetting,” Ulenspiegel told him, “so that I may discover where this great wind is coming from.”
Next a carpenter came along.
“Do you take the pavement for a mattress?” he asked.
“Before long,” said Ulenspiegel, “there are some that will be taking it for a counterpane.”
A monk came up and stopped by his side.