"Well, Nat," said Master Ambrose, "though you talk more nonsense in half an hour than most people do in a lifetime, I've been coming to the conclusion that you're not such a fool as you look--and, after all, in Hempie's old story it was the village idiot who put salt on the dragon's tail." Master Nathaniel laughed, quite pleased by this equivocal compliment--it was so rarely that Ambrose paid one a compliment at all. "Well," continued Master Ambrose, "and how are you going to set about launching your legal fiction, eh?" "Oh, I'll try and get in touch with some of the witnesses in the trial--Diggory Carp himself may turn out to be still alive. At any rate, it will give me something to do, and Lud's no place for me just now." Master Ambrose groaned: "Has it really come to this, Nat, that you have to leave Lud, and that we can do nothing against this ... this ... this cobweb of lies and buffoonery and ... well, delusion, if you like? I can tell you, I haven't spared Polydore and the rest of them the rough side of my tongue--but it's as if that fellow Leer had cast a spell on them." "But we'll break the spell, by the Golden Apples of the West, we'll break it, Ambrose!" cried Master Nathaniel buoyantly; "we'll dredge the shadows with the net of the Law, and Leer shall end on the gallows, or my name's not Chanticleer!" "Well," said Master Ambrose, "seeing you've got this bee in your bonnet about Leer you might like a little souvenir of him; it's the embroidered slipper I took from that gibbering criminal old woman's parlour, and now that her affair is settled there's no more use for it." (The variety of "silk" found in the Academy had finally been decided to be part "barratine tuftaffity" and part "figured mohair," and Miss Primrose had been heavily fined and set at liberty.) "I told you how the sight of it made him jump, and though the reason is obvious enough--he thought it was fairy fruit--it seems to take so little to set your brain romancing there's no telling what you mayn't discover from it! I'll have it sent over to you tonight." "You're very kind, Ambrose. I'm sure it will be most valuable," said Master Nathaniel ironically. During Miss Primrose's trial the slipper had from time to time been handed round among the judges, without its helping them in the slightest in the delicate distinctions they were drawing between tuftaffity and mohair. In Master Nathaniel it had aroused a vague sense of boredom and embarrassment, for it suggested a long series of birthday presents from Prunella that had put him to the inconvenience of pumping up adequate expressions of gratitude and admiration. He had little hope of being able to extricate any useful information from that slipper--still, Ambrose must have his joke. They sat in silence for a few minutes, and then Master Nathaniel rose to his feet and said, "This may be a long business, Ambrose, and we may not have an opportunity for another talk. Shall we pledge each other in wild thyme gin?"