VINCENT: Forsooth, good uncle, God disposeth and timeth your matter and your dinner both, I trust. For the end of your good tale--for which our Lord reward you!--and the beginning here of your good dinner too (from which it would be more than pity that you should any longer have tarried) meet even at the close together. ANTHONY: Well, cousin, now will we say grace. And then for a while will we leave talking and essay how our dinner shall please us, and how fair we can fall to feeding. After that, you know my customary guise (for "manner" I cannot call it, because the guise is unmannerly) to bid you not farewell but steal away from you to sleep. But you know I am not wont to sleep long in the afternoon, but even a little to forget the world. And when I wake, I will again come to you. And then is, God willing, all this long day ours, in which we shall have time enough to talk much more than shall suffice for the finishing of this one part of our matter that now alone remaineth. VINCENT: I pray you, good uncle, keep your customary manner, for "manner" may you call it well enough. For as it would be against good manners to look that a man should kneel down for courtesy when his knee is sore, so is it very good manners that a man of your age (aggrieved with such sundry sicknesses besides, that suffer you not always to sleep when you should) should not let his sleep slip away but should take it when he can. And I will, uncle, in the meanwhile steal from you, too, and speed a little errand and return to you again. ANTHONY: Stay as long as you will, and when you have dined go at your pleasure. But I pray you, tarry not long. VINCENT: You shall not need, uncle, to put me in mind of that, I would so fain have up the rest of our matter. ______________________________ BOOK THREE VINCENT: I have tarried somewhat the longer, uncle, partly because I was loth to come over-soon, lest my soon-coming might have happed to have made you wake too soon. But I tarried especially for the reason that I was delayed by someone who showed me a letter, dated at Constantinople, by which it appeareth that the great Turk prepareth a marvellous mighty army. And yet whither he will go with it, that can there yet no man tell. But I fear in good faith, uncle, that his voyage shall be hither. Howbeit, he who wrote the letter saith that it is secretly said in Constantinople that a great part of his army shall be shipped and sent either into Naples or into Sicily. ANTHONY: It may fortune, cousin, that the letter of a Venetian, dated at Constantinople, was devised at Venice. From thence come there some letters--and sometimes from Rome, too, and sometimes also from some other places--all stuffed full of such tidings that the Turk is ready to do some great exploit. These tidings they blow about for the furtherance of some such affairs as they have themselves then in hand.