“What wouldst thou do, thou scurril knave?” cried Patch angrily.
“I would strip him of his ill-gotten wealth, and leave him only thee—a fitting attendant—of all his thousand servitors,” replied Will.
“This shall to his grace's ears,” screamed Patch, amid the laughter of the company—“and see whether your back does not smart for it.”
“I fear him not,” replied Will Sommers. “I have not yet told the king my master of the rare wine we found in his cellar.”
“What wine was that, Will?” cried Jack of the Bottles.
“You shall hear,” replied Will Sommers, enjoying the disconcerted look of the other jester. “I was at the palace at Hampton, when this scant-witted knave invited me to taste some of his master's wine, and accordingly to the cellar we went. 'This wine will surprise you,' quoth he, as we broached the first hogshead. And truly it did surprise me, for no wine followed the gimlet. So we went on to another, and another, and another, till we tried half a score of them, and all with the same result. Upon this I seized a hammer which was lying by and sounded the casks, but none of them seeming empty, I at last broke the lid of one—and what do you think it contained?”
A variety of responses were returned by the laughing assemblage, during which Patch sought to impose silence upon his opponent. But Will Sommers was not to be checked.
“It contained neither vinegar, nor oil, nor lead,” he said, “but gold; ay, solid bars of gold-ingots. Every hogshead was worth ten thousand pounds, and more.”
“Credit him not, my masters,” cried Patch, amid the roars of the company; “the whole is a mere fable—an invention. His grace has no such treasure. The truth is, Will Sommers got drunk upon some choice Malmsey, and then dreamed he had been broaching casks of gold.”
“It is no fable, as you and your master will find when the king comes to sift the matter,” replied Will. “This will be a richer result to him than was ever produced by your alchemical experiments, good Signor Domingo Lamelyn.”