The following night he awaked his men at midnight again. Ulenspiegel, who slept in the garret, took his bed on his back and thus laden came down into the forge.
The baes said to him:
“Are you mad? Why do you not leave your bed in its place?”
“’Tis a custom I have,” answered Ulenspiegel, “to spend for the first seven days half the night on top of my bed and the other half under it.”
“Well, for me, it is a second custom I have to throw into the street my impudent workmen with leave to pass the first week above the pavement and the second below it.”
“In your cellar, baes, if you please, beside the casks of bruinbier,” replied Ulenspiegel.
LXIV
Having left the wheelwright and gone back to Flanders, he must hire himself as apprentice to a shoemaker who liked better to stay in the streets than to wield the awl in his workshop. Ulenspiegel, seeing him for the hundredth time ready to go abroad, asked him how he must cut the leather for vamps.
“Cut it,” replied the baes, “for big feet and average feet, so that all that lead big cattle and little cattle may get into them handily.”