“He told us some [i.e. serpents] in the waste places of Lancashire do grow to a great bigness, and do feed upon larkes which they take thus: They observe, when the lark is soared to the highest, and do crawl till they come to be just underneath them; and there they place themselves with their mouth uppermost, and there, as is conceived, they do eject poyson upon the bird; for the bird do suddenly come down again in its course of a circle, and falls directly into the mouth of the serpent; which is very strange.” It _is_ very strange; and that lark at his highest, be it observed--how many hundred feet up?--and the stupendous accuracy of the aim! But Mr. Templer was “a great traveller”--and, of course, therefore, not at all a great liar--and necessarily, on the other hand, too shrewd a man to be himself taken in by the gammoning of local naturalists. Of the tarantula he goes on to say that “All the harvest long” (in Italy presumably) “there are fiddlers go up and down the fields everywhere, in expectation of being hired by those that are stung.” Bless him! and bless his admirable chronicler, who never recorded a more ingenious tale--save that, perhaps, which relates of his friend, Batalier, the jovial but conscienceless, cheapening a butt of Bordeaux wine of some merchant, on the score that it was soured by a thunderstorm, the said storm having been just produced by an artful rogue hired to counterfeit the noise of one, with rain and hail, “upon a deale board”--an incident which reminds one of Peter Simple and Captain Kearney. But, for Mr. Pepys’s book of tales; no part of it survives, so far as I know, to supplement the Diary, or very possibly there might be found in it some mention of the adventure of Jack Bannister with the cly-faker. This adventure had befallen our musician some time before his encounter with the Clerk of the Acts, which had turned out so signally to his advantage, and one may be certain that the grateful protégé, in the course of unburdening his heart to that generous patron, would not have omitted to mention an incident so poignantly associated with his recent hard experiences. The story, however, may be given in our own words.