And they stopped at Meulestee, the little town of the mills, whose red roofs are seen everywhere, and there they agreed to carry on their trades apart and to meet each other at night before curfew in de Zwaen, at the Swan Inn.
Lamme wandered about the streets of Ghent selling olie-koekjes getting a liking for this trade, seeking for his wife, emptying many a quart pot and eating continually. Ulenspiegel had delivered letters from the prince to Jacob Scoelap, licentiate in medicine; to Lieven Smet, cloth seller; to Jan Wulfschaeger, to Gillis Coorne, the scarlet dyer, and to Jan de Roose, tile maker, who gave him the money harvested by them for the Prince, and bade him wait some days longer at Ghent and in the neighbourhood, and he would be given still more.
Those men having been hanged later on the New Gibbet for heresy, their bodies were buried in the Gallows Field, near the Bruges Gate.
XXX
Meanwhile, the provost Spelle le Roux, armed with his red wand, was hurrying from town to town on his lean horse, everywhere setting up scaffolds, lighting fires of execution, digging graves to bury poor women and girls alive in them. And the King inherited.
Ulenspiegel being at Meulestee with Lamme, under a tree, found himself full of weary lassitude. It was cold although the month was June. From the skies, laden with gray clouds, there fell a fine hail.
“My son,” said Lamme, “you are for the past four nights shamelessly running wild, gadding after the bona robas, you go to sleep in de Zoeten Inval, at the Sweet Fall; you will do like the man on the sign, falling head foremost into a hive of bees. Vainly do I wait for you in de Zwaen, and I draw evil forebodings from this liquorish living. Why do you not take a wife virtuously?”
“Lamme,” said Ulenspiegel, “he to whom one woman is all women, and to whom all women are one in this gentle combat that they call love, must not lightly rush upon his choice.”
“And Nele, do you not think at all on her?”