“O do not mind her,” said Katharine Heywood, coming to his relief: “she is privileged to say what she pleases, without meaning what she says; and my poor name always serves to point a fancy, if she wants one: if she were not so young and so pretty, she might be taken up for a false fortune-teller, and a dealer in witchcraft.” “Cousin Kate, if I am a fortune-teller, I am a true one; and if a witch, you know I am a white one, and work marvellous cures. Shall I tell your fortune? and shall I name the name of a true knight in a far country?” A glance from the noble eyes of Katharine, which no one perceived but Jane Lambert, rebuked her into silence; and trying, though awkwardly, to laugh off the liberty which she had evidently taken with the feelings of Katharine, she sent her trencher for some venison, and said no more. Sir Oliver, too, fastening upon the simple fact of Juxon having turned a fisherman, began rallying him for having made so bad an exchange, as to leave the merry and social sport of hunting for the dull and solitary exercise of angling. “It is true,” said the knight, “I have myself been forced to give up the jolly buck hunt; but, life of me, I could never take up with a rod and line in the place of it. I do wonder, when I see a man mope about the meadows, and stand, it may be, for hours, under the same willow, by the broken bank of a sluggish river, that it doth not end in his hanging himself for very weariness of the flat world.” “And yet,” quoth Juxon, “fishing hath its pleasures, ay, and its sport too; but if the angler catch nothing, still he hath a wholesome walk in the pure air; and if he go abroad early, and listeneth to the matins of the heaven-loving lark, he shall not want sweeter music than the cry of hounds, and the blasts of hunting horns.” “By my faith, Master Juxon, you are bewitched; but whether by old Margery or by the sparkling eyes of Jane I say not; by Margery, methinks; for the faint heart of an angler will never win such a sprightly lady of the woods as our Jane.” “Nay, nay, Sir Oliver, when a man is bewitched, and by love, too, as Mistress Jane will have it, his thoughts must be too roving and unquiet to sit still upon a mossy bank watching for the trembling of a quill.” “Ay, ay; but he may sit quiet enough, and not watch any thing but his own fancies. I do verily think that thou must be touched with some strange care, to let thy brave gelding race it round his pasture for the madness of his desire to follow the chase, at sound of which he neigheth for his rider, and thou sitting the while like some poor scholar alone upon a tree stump.” “At the least I find one blessing rests on anglers--where they walk, the grace of humility doth grow, lowly as the daisy, and plentiful as the meadow sweet.”