But the girls, thrusting their sprightly faces into the openings in the canvas of the carts:
“You are very young,” said they, “to preach to soldiers. Come up into our carts, we will teach you pleasant discourses.”
Ulenspiegel would willingly have obeyed, but could not on account of his letters; already two of the girls, reaching their round white arms out of the cart, were trying to pull him up to them, when the hoer-wyfel, jealous, said to Ulenspiegel: “If you do not take yourself off, I will have your head off.”
And Ulenspiegel went farther off, looking slyly at the fresh girls, all golden in the sun, which shone bright and clear on the road.
They came to Berchem. Philippe de Lannoy, sieur de Beauvoir, the commander of the Flemings, ordered them to halt.
At this place there was an oak of middle height, bereft of all its branches, except one big bough broken off halfway on which the month before there had been an Anabaptist hanged by the neck.
The soldiers stopped; the sutlers came to them, and sold them bread, wine, beer, meats of every kind. As for the girls, they sold them sugar, castrelins, almonds, tartlets, seeing which Ulenspiegel grew still hungrier.
Suddenly climbing up the tree like a monkey, he planted himself astride of the great bough that was some seven feet above the earth; there, lashing himself with a scourge, while the troopers and the girls made circle about him:
“In the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost,” said he. “Amen. It is written: ‘He that giveth to the poor lendeth to the Lord’: soldiers, and ye, beauteous dames, sweet companions in love to these valiant warriors, lend ye to the Lord, which is to say: give me bread, meat, wine, beer, if ye will, tartlets if it please you, and God, who is rich, will repay it you in morsels of ortolans, in rivers of malvoisie, in mountains of sugar candy, in rystpap which ye shall eat in paradise with silver spoons.”
Then bemoaning himself: