“At once,” replied Ulenspiegel; “but who said that strawberries are good in the morning? Thy mouth is far better.”
IX
Ulenspiegel, Lamme, and Nele had, like their friends and comrades, taken from the convents the wealth gotten from the people by the help of processions, feigned miracles, and other Roman mummeries. This was against the orders of the Silent, the prince of liberty, but the money helped with the charges of the war. Lamme Goedzak, not content with providing himself with money, looted from out the convents hams, sausages, flasks of beer and wine, and came back from them joyously carrying across his breast a baldric of fowls, geese, turkeys, capons, hens and pullets, and leading behind him on a rope certain monastical calves and pigs. And this by right of war, said he.
Rejoicing in each prize, he fetched it to the ship that there might be revel and feast, but lamented all the same that the master cook was so ignorant in the science of sauces and fricassees.
Now on that day the Beggars, having looked victoriously upon the cup, said to Ulenspiegel:
“Thou hast thy nose always in the wind to smell out news of terra firma; thou knowest all the adventures of the war: sing them to us. And Lamme shall beat the drum the while and the pretty little fifer shall squeal to the measure of thy song.”
And Ulenspiegel said:
“One bright cool day in May, Ludwig of Nassau, thinking to enter into Mons, finds not his footmen nor his horse. A few trusty men held a gate open and a drawbridge down, that he might have the town. But the citizens seized the gate and the drawbridge. Where are the soldiers of Count Louis? The citizens are about to hoist up the bridge. Count Louis winds his horn.”
And Ulenspiegel sang: