Feeble was satisfied. So, no doubt, was Wart.
“Peter Bullcalf of the Green,” was the next called.
“Trust me, a likely fellow,” said the Knight: “prick me Bullcalf till he roar again.”
“Oh good my lord Captain——” Bullcalf roared without waiting for the operation.
“What, dost thou roar before thou art pricked?”
“Oh! Sir, I am a diseased man.” Bullcalf bellowed, proving that his lungs were at all events not yet affected.
“What disease hast thou?”
“A villainous cold, Sir—a cough, Sir—which I caught with ringing in the King’s affairs on his coronation day, Sir.”
“Come, thou shalt go to the wars in a gown; we will have away thy cold; and I will take such order that thy friends shall ring for thee.”
It was fortunate that with this sally Sir John Falstaff desisted for the present, or he would in all probability have been the death of Master Robert Shallow. That gentleman repeated the words, “And I will take such order that thy friends shall ring for thee,” to himself, many times over, that he might be able to retail the jest to his admiring friends. He circulated it at first as one of the many brilliant things Sir John Falstaff had said on the occasion of his first visit to Shallow Hall. But in the course of time the worthy magistrate appropriated it to his own service, and never missed an opportunity of bringing it forward (with the point carefully omitted) as an original witticism from the inexhaustible repertoire of himself, Master Robert Shallow.