“Lord bless you, no!” cried Bulstrode loudly and frankly. “My father kept a mews, and my mother--God bless her!--I’ll say no more. But look you, Lewis Pryor,” said he, rising, and with a sort of rude dignity, “though I be not a gentleman _here_,” slapping his body, “I’m a gentleman _here_,” tapping his forehead. “I’m an aristocrat from my chops upward.” Lewis had risen too. He thought this was very queer talk, but he did not laugh at it, or feel contempt for Bulstrode, who had straightened himself up, and had actually lost something of his plebeian aspect. “And,” he added with an ill-suppressed chuckle, “I’m a gentleman when I’m drunk. You see, as long as I’m sober I remember the mews, and my father in his black weepers driving the hearse, and the delight I used to feel when the young sprigs of the nobility and gentry at the university would ask me to their wine parties to hear me spout Ovid and Anacreon, for _they_ knew I wasn’t a gentleman. But when I’m drunk, I only remember that I was a ‘double first’; that every Greek and Latinist in England knows Wat Bulstrode’s name; and when this precious philosopher Skelton was scouring the universities to find a man to help him out with his--ha! ha!--_great work_, he could not for love or money get any better man than ragged, drunken, out-at-elbows Wat Bulstrode. I tell you, boy, when I’m drunk I’m a king! I’m more--I’m a gentleman! There is something in Greek which provokes an intolerable thirst. You say that Latin is dry; so it is, so it is, my boy--very dry and musty!” and then Bulstrode, in a rich, sweet, rollicking voice, as delicious as his speaking voice, trolled out the fag end of a song that echoed and re-echoed through the green woods: “I went to Strasburg, when I got drunk, With the most learned Professor Brunck. I went to Wortz, where I got more drunken, With the more learned Professor Bruncken.” Bulstrode had quite forgotten the boy’s presence. Lewis gazed at him with wide, innocent boyish eyes. It was rather a tipsy age, and to be a little convivial was considered a mark of a liberal spirit, but Lewis was astute enough to see that this was not the sort of gentlemanly joviality which prevailed in the age and in the country. The song of the reapers was still mellowly heard in the distance; their scythe blades glittered in the sun, the merriment, the plenty, the beauty and simplicity of the scene was like Arcady; but the contrast between what Nature had made, and what man had made of himself, in Bulstrode, was appalling. Suddenly, the careless delight expressed in Bulstrode’s look and manner vanished, and a strange passion of despair overcame him.