Sir Thomas shook his head, and declared he would not be uncharitable to rector, or dean, or doctor, but that certain surmises swam uppermost. He then winked at Master Silas, who said, incontinently,—
“You have it, Sir Thomas! The blind buzzards! with their stars and saps!”
“Well, but Silas! you yourself have told us over and over again, in church, that there are arcana.”
“So there are,—I uphold it,” replied Master Silas; “but a fig for the greater part, and a fig-leaf for the rest. As for these signs, they are as plain as any page in the Revelation.”
Sir Thomas, after short pondering, said, scoffingly,—
“In regard to the rawness of the air having any effect whatsoever on those who discourse orthodoxically on theology, it is quite as absurd as to imagine that a man ever caught cold in a Protestant church. I am rather of opinion that it was a judgment on the rector for his evil-mindedness toward the cook, the Lord foreknowing that he was about to be wilful and vengeful in that quarter. It was, however, more advisedly that he took other pullets, on his own view of the case, although it might be that the same pullets would suit him again as well as ever, when his appetite should return; for it doth not appear that they were loath to lay, but laid somewhat unsatisfactorily.
“Now, youth,” continued his worship, “if in our clemency we should spare thy life, study this higher elegiacal strain which thou hast carried with thee from Oxford; it containeth, over and above an unusual store of biography, much sound moral doctrine, for those who are heedful in the weighing of it. And what can be more affecting than—
‘At mess he lost quite
His small appetite,
By losing his friend the good dean’?
And what an insight into character! Store it up; store it up! Small appetite, particular; good dean, generick.”
Hereupon did Master Silas jerk me with his indicative joint, the elbow to wit, and did say in my ear,—