Nay sometimes there are gleams of hilarity too; little snatches of encouragement granted even to a Governor. 'Once my Lord Abbot and I, coming down from London through the Forest, I inquired of an old woman whom we came up to, Whose wood this was, and of what manor; who the master, who the keeper?'--All this I knew very well beforehand, and my Lord Abbot too, Bozzy that I was! But 'the old woman answered, The wood belonged to the new Abbot of St. Edmund's, was of the manor of Harlow, and the keeper of it was one Arnald. How did he behave to the people of the manor? I asked farther. She answered that he used to be a devil incarnate, _daemon vivus_, an enemy of God, and flayer of the peasants' skins,'--skinning them like live eels, as the manner of some is: but that now he dreads the new Abbot, knowing him to be a wise and sharp man, and so treats the people reasonably, _tractat homines pacifice.'_ Whereat the Lord Abbot _factus est hilaris,_--could not but take a triumphant laugh for himself; and determines to leave that Harlow manor yet unmeddled with, for a while. A brave man, strenuously fighting, fails not of a little triumph, now and then, to keep him in heart. Everywhere we try at least to give the adversary as good as he brings; and, with swift force or slow watchful manoeuvre, extinguish this and the other solecism, leave one solecism less in God's Creation; and so _proceed_ with our battle, not slacken or surrender in it! The Fifty feudal Knights; for example, were of unjust greedy temper, and cheated us, in the Installation-day, of ten knights'-fees;-- but they know now whether that has profited them aught, and I Jocelin know. Our Lord Abbot for the moment had to endure it, and say nothing; but he watched his time.