With tales both old and true;
To William all give audience,
And pray ye for his noddle,
For all the Fairies’ evidence
Were lost if it were addle.’
There, gentle reader, that was the way in which the Bishop-Poet spake of me. I warrant you, my cheeks tingle still as I repeat the lines.”
“Indeed? cheeks that blushed for the first time two centuries and a half ago, must, I should think, have nearly blushed their last by this time. I cannot read your riddle. You would not have us believe, would you, that a man who was born in the sixteenth century, was story-telling in the nineteenth? I fear you must be story-telling in more senses than one, or else that the event so much deprecated by the Bishop of Norwich, hath befallen you, and that the ‘noddle’ is ‘addle.’”
“Ah, gentle reader, is it even so? Can you think of no other solution of the difficulty? I fear me that you have a larger share of the unbelief of this dull, plodding, unimaginative, money-getting, money-loving nineteenth century, than of the humour, and simplicity, and romance of the seventeenth.”
“Come then, I will hazard a solution. What if the fairies, whose official you have admitted yourself to be, carried you off some moonlight night, two hundred years ago, and hid you for that space in their secret chambers, amid the recesses of the grassy hills?”
“Hush! hush! kind reader; speak not so loudly. You know not who may be listening. However, I do not say but that it may be even as you suppose. Perhaps, while time and change have worked their will on others, I have been exempted from their influence.”