If Simon had been a poet, like his disdained acquaintance of the road-side, he would have been delighted with the May-day graces of the place--with the new-green livery of the ancient trees; with the deep glades and dim aisles, down which the dying sunlight lingered; with the fantastic shapes that bole and bough put on under the enchantment of the waning day; with all the mystery and piety of the wood. But to Simon a wood, in the main, was a place where enemies love to lurk in ambush, and though Greece was for the hour at peace, custom made Simon look about him as warily as if he walked in time of war. Custom, to his surprise though no whit to his alarm, was justified of her pains. Something glittered in that clump of bushes; something stirred behind that mighty tree. Simon swung his staff to his right hand, and those who waited, guessing themselves detected, came leaping from concealment, left and right, and faced him--two men with drawn swords, ruffians of the kind that follow camps, soldiers in name, robbers in fact and act, never fighters unless the odds were hot on their party. Simon knew the kind well enough and despised them highly, not because they were plunderers, but because they were skulkers, shufflers, fluffers, mean moths in a rich coat. The jack-rascals were clad in habits fitted to their forest play of trap and catch--dull greens and sullen tawnies, good for lurking in, easily commingled, for the unwary, with the green and tawny of a wood. The rogues would have rushed Simon, but he stood so steady and made so mighty a mill-wheel with his monstrous cudgel that they were daunted, and bayed at him. "Stand and deliver," cried one. "Deliver and stand," the other varied. Simon eyed them composedly, plainly unperturbed. He felt that he was master of the match, and made merry in the sense of his strength. "Good-evening, crimps." Thus he greeted them cheerfully. "Why should I stand and what should I deliver?" "The contents of thy wallet, fat rascal," made answer the man who seemed to hold a kind of chieftainship in the little league of two. Simon grounded his cudgel. "Fellow," he said, "I am not a rascal, neither am I fat. What you call fat is brawn, solid brawn. For the other matter, I am as poor as the ancient patriarch." "We will not take thy word for that," the second robber grumbled, and the brace of knaves moved a little ways nearer to their quarry. Simon guessed that their game was to get at him, one on each side, and to counter their purpose the hunted became the hunter. He moved up on them whirling his baton, so valiant a piece of anger that the robbers yielded ground and their hearts were as water. He thundered at them as he moved: "Also, I am a little less strong than Samson, the gate-snatcher, and will tackle twenty such as you." One faintheart called to the other faintheart: