Hip. Scarce can I read the stories on your brow, Which age hath writ there: you look youthful still.
Orl. I eat snakes, my Lord, I eat snakes. My heart shall never have a wrinkle in it, so long as I can cry Hem! with a clear voice. * *
Hip. You are the happier man, Sir.
Orl. May not old Friscobaldo, my Lord, be merry now, ha? I have a little, have all things, have nothing: I have no wife, I have no child, have no chick, and why should I not be in my jocundare?
Hip. Is your wife then departed?
Orl. She’s an old dweller in those high countries, yet not from me: here, she’s here; a good couple are seldom parted.
Hip. You had a daughter, too, Sir, had you not?
Orl. Oh, my Lord! this old tree had one branch, and but one branch, growing out of it: it was young, it was fair, it was strait: I pruned it daily, drest it carefully, kept it from the wind, help’d it to the sun; yet for all my skill in planting, it grew crooked, it bore crabs: I hew’d it down. What’s become of it, I neither know nor care.
Hip. Then can I tell you what’s become of it: that branch is wither’d.
Orl. So ’twas long ago.