"I'm not the man to refuse your wild-thyme gin, Nat. And you don't often give one a chance of tasting it, you old miser," said Master Ambrose, trying to mask his emotion with facetiousness. When he had been given a glass filled with the perfumed grass-green syrup, he raised it, and smiling at Master Nathaniel, began, "Well, Nat...." "Stop a minute, Ambrose!" interrupted Master Nathaniel. "I've got a sudden silly whim that we must should take an oath I must have read when I was a youngster in some old book ... the words have suddenly come back to me. They go like this: 'We' (and then we say our own names), 'Nathaniel Chanticleer and Ambrose Honeysuckle, swear by the Living and the Dead, by the Past and the Future, by Memories and Hopes, that if a Vision comes begging at our door we will take it in and warm it at our hearth, and that we will not be wiser than the foolish nor more cunning than the simple, and that we will remember that he who rides the Wind needs must go where his Steed carries him.' Say it after me, Ambrose." "By the White Ladies of the Fields, never in my life have I heard such fustian!" grumbled Master Ambrose. But Nat seemed to have set his heart on this absurd ceremony, and Master Ambrose felt that the least he could do was to humour him, for who could say what the future held in store and when they might meet again. So, in a protesting and excessively matter-of-fact voice, he repeated after him the words of the oath. When, and in what book had Master Nathaniel found it? For it was the vow taken by the candidates for initiation into the first degree of the ancient Mysteries of Dorimare. Do not forget that, in the eye of the Law, Master Nathaniel was a dead man. CHAPTER XVIII MISTRESS IVY PEPPERCORN The tasks assigned to the clerks in Master Nathaniel's counting-house did not always concern cargoes and tonnage. For instance, once for two whole days they had not opened a ledger, but had been kept busy, under their employer's supervision, in cutting out and pinning together fantastic paper costumes to be worn at Ranulph's birthday party. And they were quite accustomed to his shutting himself into his private office, with strict injunctions that he was not to be disturbed, while he wrote, say, a comic valentine to old Dame Polly Pyepowders, popping his head frequently round the door to demand their help in finding a rhyme. So they were not surprised that morning when told to close their books and to devote their talents to discovering, by whatever means they chose, whether there were any relations living in Lud of a west country farmer called Gibberty who had died nearly forty years ago.