"Go away!... You must have been dreaming." "And yet," replied another and less incredulous slave, "that is quite possible. Our comrade is not yet eighteen, and his chin is as innocent of a beard as any young girl's." "I maintain that if that nun is not Eleuthere, she is his sister ... if he has one." "I tell you," put in the old goldsmith with marked impatience, "I tell you that you are ninnies, and that if you are anxious for a trip to the whipping-post and to renew your acquaintance with the thongs of the whip, all you have to do is to persevere in talks like that." "But Father Bonaik--" "I allow chattering at work; but when the words may translate themselves into the strokes of a whip on your backs, then the subject seems to me badly chosen. You know, as well as I, that the abbess--" "Is hot-tempered and bedeviled, Father Bonaik." "Are you anxious to have the flesh flayed off your backs, unhappy lads! I order you to hold your tongues." "And what are we to talk about if not of our masters and the abbess?" "Here," said the old man anxious to have the subject drop, "I have often promised you to tell you the story of the illustrious master of our trade, the glory of the artisans of Gaul. Let us talk of that artist." "About the good Eloi? The great and saintly Eloi, Father Bonaik, the friend of the good King Dagobert?" "Call him the 'good' Eloi, my boys; never was there a better; but do not say the 'good' King Dagobert. That King had everybody who displeased him throttled; he pillaged, he levied ransom upon the poor, and he kept a harem like an Arabian Caliph. Listen, children. The good Eloi was born in 588 or thereabouts, at Catalacte, a small village in the neighborhood of Limoges. His parents were freemen, but of obscure and poor condition." "Father Bonaik, if Eloi was born in 588, that must have been about a hundred and fifty years ago. That is a century and a half." "Yes, my boys, seeing we are now almost at 738." "And did you know him?" asked one of the lads with an incredulous smile. "Did you know the good Eloi?" "Certainly, I did, seeing I shall soon be ninety-six, and that he died last century, in 659, nearly eighty years ago." "You were then quite young?"