"No!" answered Dyram, bluntly. "I will take service with no one any more. I was not meant for a varlet. I can do better things than be the serving-man of any knight or noble."
"What can you do?" demanded Roydon, with a somewhat sarcastic smile.
"What can I not?" exclaimed Dyram. "I can read better than a priest--write better than a clerk. I can speak languages that would make your ears tingle, without understanding what you heard. I can compound all essences and drugs; I can work in gold, silver, or iron; and I know some secrets that would well nigh raise the dead."
"Indeed!" said the knight. "Then you must be a monk, or a doctor of Oxford."
"Neither," replied the man; "but I see you disbelieve me. Shall I give you a proof of what I can do?"
"Yes," answered Sir Simeon; "I should like to see some spice of your skill."
"In what way shall it be," asked Ned Dyram. "If you will order up some charcoal, with this little instrument and these pinchers I will make you a chain to go round your wrist out of a gold noble; or, if there be a Greek book in the monastery, I will read you a page therefrom, and expound it, in the presence of whom you will, as a judge; for well I wot you yourself know nothing about it."
"Nor wish to know," replied the knight; "but I will have neither of these experiments; the one would be too long, the other too tedious. You said that you had secrets that would well nigh raise the dead. I have heard of such things, and I should like to see them tried."
"Would you not be afraid?" asked Ned Dyram.
"No!--Why?" answered Sir Simeon of Roydon. "The dead cannot hurt me."