Here I found a different reception. A rosy-cheeked little man, with a paunch as great as a well-fed ox, was sitting on a high chair, so that his feet barely touched the ground. He was whistling some ditty, and busily mending his finger-nails with a little knife.
"Why, whom have we here?" he cries out, when he saw me; "another scholar, and a great one. Why, man, what do you at the trade, when you might be carrying a musket or leading a troop of pikemen?"
I was tempted to answer him in his own way.
"And what do you," I asked, "at the trade, when you might be the chief cook to the French king, with power to poison the whole nobility?"
He laughed long and loudly. "Ah, you have me there, more's the pity. But what though I love my dinner? Did not Jacob the patriarch, and Esau, the mighty Esau, though I have little credit by the ensample? But come, tell me your name, for I begin to love thee. You have a shrewd wit, and a pleasing presence. You may go far."
I gave him my letters, and when he had read them, he came down from his perch and shook me by the hand.
"You are a Scot," he said. "I never knew any Scot but one, and he was hanged on a tree for robbing the Burgomaster's coach. I was a lad at school, and I mind me 'twas rare sport. So I have a kindly feeling for your nation, though may God send you a better fate than that one. But what do you seek to learn? Greek? Faugh, there is no Greek worth a straw, save Anacreon, and he is not a patch upon our moderns, on François Villon of Paris, whose soul God rest, and our brave Desportes. Philosophy? Bah! 'Tis all a monstrous fraud. I have sounded all the depths of it, and found them but shallows. Theology? Tush! You will learn more theology in an inn in the Morschstraat than in all the schools. Such are my beliefs. But God has compelled me for my sins to teach the Hellenic tongue to a perverse generation at the small sum of five crowns. We study the Republic of Plato, and I trust you may find some profit. You will dine with me. Nay, I will take no denial. To-night, in my house, I will show you how a quail should be dressed. I have the very devil of a cook, a man who could dress a dry goatskin to your taste. And wine! I have the best that ever came from the Rhineside and escaped the maw of a swinish Teuton. You will come?"
I could only escape by promising, which I did with a good grace, for if there was little profit in Master Quellinus's company, there was much pleasure.
CHAPTER II
I VISIT MASTER PETER WISHART