The printer's gloomy and black features glared with a sudden rage. 'How should all be well with a land,' he cried, 'where in high places reigns harlotry?' He raised his clenched fist on high and glared round upon his audience. 'Corruption that reacheth round and about and down till it hath found a seedbed even in this poor house of my father's? Or if it is well with this land now, how shall it continue well when witchcraft rules near the King himself, and the Devil of Rome hath there his emissaries.' A chitter of sound came from his audience, so that it appeared that they were all of a strain. They moved in their seats; the shipman cried out-- 'Ay! witchcraft! witchcraft!' The huge bulk of the stranger, black and like a bull's, half rose from its chair. 'Body of God!' he cried out. 'This I will not bear.' Again the older man leaned solicitously above him and whispered, pleading with his hands, and Lascelles said hastily-- 'Speak of your own knowledge. How should you know of what passes in high places?' 'Why!' the printer cried out, 'is it not the common report? Do not all men know it? Do not the butchers sing of it in the shambles, and the bot-flies buzz of it one to the other? I tell you it is spread from here into Almain, where the very horse-sellers are a-buzz with it.' In his chair the stranger cried out-- 'Ah! ah!' as if he were in great pain. He struggled with his feet and then sat still. 'I have heard witnesses that will testify to these things,' the printer said. 'I will bring them here into this room before ye.' He turned upon the stranger. 'Master,' he said, 'if ye know not of this, you are the only man in England that is ignorant!' The stranger said with a bitter despair-- 'Well, I am come to hear what ye do say!' So he heard tales from all the sewers of London, and it was plain to him that all the commonalty cried shame upon their King. He screamed and twisted there in his chair at the last, and when he was come out into the darkness he fell upon his companion, and beat him so that he screamed out. He might have died--for, though the King's guard with their torches and halberds were within a bowshot of them, they stirred no limb. And it was a party of fellows bat-fowling along the hedges of that field that came through the dark, attracted by the glare of the torches, the blaze of the scarlet clothes, and the outcry. And when they came, asking why that great man belaboured this thin and fragile one, black shadows both against the light, the big man answered, howling-- 'This man hath made me bounden to slay my wife.' They said that that was a thing some of them would have been glad of.