CEL. God be here! MEL. Who is there? CEL. Will ye buy any thread? MEL. Yea, marry, good mother, I pray you come in. CEL. Christ save you, fair mistress, and God be your speed; And health be to you and your kin; And Mary, God's mother, that blessed virgin, Preserve and prosper your womanly personage, And well to enjoy your youth and pucellage! For that time pleasures are most escheved;[59] And age is the hospital of all manner sickness, The resting-place of all thought unrelieved; The sport of time, past the end of all quickness: Neighbour to death; a dry stock without sweetness: Discomfort, disease all age alloweth; A tree without sap, that small charge boweth. MEL. I marvel, mother, ye speak so much ill Of age, that all folk desire effectuously. CEL. They desire hurt for themselves as all of will; And the cause why they desire to come thereby, Is for to live; for death is so loathly. He that is sorrowful would live to be sorrier, And he that is old would live to be older. Fair damsel, who can show all the hurts of age? His weariness, feebleness, his discontenting; His childishness, frowardness of his rage; Wrinkling in the face, lack of sight and hearing; Hollowness of mouth, fall of teeth, faint of going; And, worst of all, possessed with poverty, And the limbs arrested with debility. MEL. Mother, ye have taken great pain for age, Would ye not return to the beginning? CEL. Fools are they that are past their passage, To begin again, which be at the ending; For better is possession than the desiring. MEL. I desire to live longer; do I well, or no? CEL. That ye desire well, I think not so; For as soon goeth to market the lamb's fell As the sheep's;[60] none so old but may live a year; And there is none so young but, ye wot well, May die in a day. Then no advantage is here Between youth and age; the matter is clear. MEL. With thy fabling and thy reasoning, i-wis, I am beguiled; but I have known thee ere this: Art not Celestine, that dwelleth by the river side? CEL. Yea, forsooth. MEL. Indeed, age hath arrayed[61] thee! That thou art she, now can scant be espied. Me thinketh by thy favour thou shouldest be she: Thou art sore changed, thou mayest believe me. CEL. Fair maiden, keep thou well this time of youth; But beauty shall pass at the last, this is truth: Yet I am not so old as ye judge me. MEL. Good mother, I joy much of thine accointenance,[62] And thy motherly reasons right well please me. And now I thank thee here for thy pastance. Farewell, till another time, that hap may chance, Again that we two may meet together. Mayhap ye have business, I know not whither. CEL. O angelic image! O heart so precious! Oh, how thou speakest, it rejoiceth me to hear.