Idle though this good fellow was on occasion, yet when the fit came upon him no Israelite in the House of Bondage would work harder than he. ‘Ay, this is one of my working days,’ he would say to a neighbour, who had poked his nose in at the door to ask what ailed him that he worked so early and sang so loudly in his workshop nowadays. Then away he would go again with his chisel and mallet, hammering, chipping, and shaping as though ’twas all the good Lord had sent him in the world for, and singing like the birds in spring. ‘Wert thou but in this mind always,’ his neighbour would answer, ‘there were no more laborious Christian in England than thou.’ Whereat Will would laugh and say, ‘Thou must not muzzle the ox that treadeth out the corn; I cannot draw in plough seven days a week.’ At such times he would go with more joy to his labour than other men to the wassail, and such was the delight he took in shaping his figures and forms and fruit and flowers out of the stubborn and recalcitrant stone, that you would have said that the Almighty Himself had had no diviner ecstasy when He hewed the world out of chaos in the first great act of creation. But ardent and zealous as he was to make his thoughts live in the stone and wood, he had no skill or energy in the collection of his just dues and debts, and since folk do not generally pay what they owe unless they are asked twice or thrice, yea, many times, it came about that many a pretty piece of work that he had wrought came gratis to the hands of unscrupulous men, who did not consider that the labourer is worthy of his hire, and that a debt is a debt although it be not importunely demanded. So it came about, that by dint of free spending and poor managing, in less than three years from his father’s death, William found that the oaken chest in the upper chamber had been quite emptied of its coin, and began to be hard put to it for money in his pocket, especially as at this time there was for a short spell little employment of his kind to be gotten. William was not a man to go about with an empty purse if by hook or by crook it might be avoided, so having pondered the matter a little, he straightway bethought himself of the Twelve Apostles, and without more ado betook himself to the dwelling of one Master Matthew, the wealthiest and most notorious of them all.