‘Divine Astrology tells us,’ said Mr Culpeper. ‘The horse, being a martial beast that beareth man to battle, belongs naturally to the red planet Mars--the Lord of War. I would show you him, but he’s too near his setting. Rats and mice, doing their businesses by night, come under the dominion of our Lady the Moon. Now between Mars and Luna, the one red, t’other white, the one hot t’other cold and so forth, stands, as I have told you, a natural antipathy, or, as you say, hatred. Which antipathy their creatures do inherit. Whence, good people, you may both see and hear your cattle stamp in their stalls for the self-same causes as decree the passages of the stars across the unalterable face of Heaven! Ahem!’ Puck lay along chewing a leaf. They felt him shake with laughter, and Mr Culpeper sat up stiffly. ‘I myself’ said he, ‘have saved men’s lives, and not a few neither, by observing at the proper time--there is a time, mark you, for all things under the sun--by observing, I say, so small a beast as a rat in conjunction with so great a matter as this dread arch above us.’ He swept his hand across the sky. ‘Yet there are those,’ he went on sourly, ‘who have years without knowledge.’ ‘Right,’ said Puck. ‘No fool like an old fool.’ Mr Culpeper wrapped his cloak round him and sat still while the children stared at the Great Bear on the hilltop. ‘Give him time,’ Puck whispered behind his hand. ‘He turns like a timber-tug--all of a piece.’ ‘Ahem!’ Mr Culpeper said suddenly. ‘I’ll prove it to you. When I was physician to Saye’s Horse, and fought the King--or rather the man Charles Stuart--in Oxfordshire (I had my learning at Cambridge), the plague was very hot all around us. I saw it at close hands. He who says I am ignorant of the plague, for example, is altogether beside the bridge.’ ‘We grant it,’ said Puck solemnly. ‘But why talk of the plague this rare night?’ ‘To prove my argument. This Oxfordshire plague, good people, being generated among rivers and ditches, was of a werish, watery nature. Therefore it was curable by drenching the patient in cold water, and laying him in wet cloths; or at least, so I cured some of them. Mark this. It bears on what shall come after.’ ‘Mark also, Nick,’ said Puck, that we are not your College of Physicians, but only a lad and a lass and a poor lubberkin. Therefore be plain, old Hyssop on the Wall!’ ‘To be plain and in order with you, I was shot in the chest while gathering of betony from a brookside near Thame, and was took by the King’s men before their Colonel, one Blagg or Bragge, whom I warned honestly that I had spent the week past among our plague-stricken. He flung me off into a cowshed, much like this here, to die, as I supposed; but one of their priests crept in by night and dressed my wound. He was a Sussex man like myself.’ ‘Who was that?’ said Puck suddenly. ‘Zack Tutshom?’ ‘No, Jack Marget,’ said Mr Culpeper.