He stood up, left the mulberry tree, and because they were young and not unfair, and there was to be seen in it no harm or displeasure, he kissed them both. They laughed and pushed him away, then, their hands on his shoulders, each kissed back. Leaving them and the hamlet behind, he came again into fair country where the blue sky touched the hill-tops. Morning had slipped into afternoon. Not far away would be a town he had heard of. He meant to get there a different dress. It was necessary to do that. Wandering so, in this serf’s wear, he might at any hour be taken up, called to account, made to name his master. “Lord Love” would not answer far. Say that, without fathomless trouble, he got the dress, what was going to follow upon the getting? He did not know. Ahead of him walked a thin figure wrapped in a black mantle and wearing a wide hat somewhat like a palmer’s. Garin lessened the distance between them. The black-clad one was talking, or more correctly, chanting to himself as he walked, and that with such abstraction from the surrounding world that he did not hear the other moving close behind him. Garin listened before speaking. “In Ethiopia is found basilisk, cockatrice, and phœnix; in certain parts of Greece the centaur, and in the surrounding seas mermaiden. The dolphin is of all beasts the tenderest-hearted. Elephants worship the sun.... Pliny tells us that there are eleven kinds of lightning. Clap your hands when it lightens.... The elements are four—earth, air, fire and water. To each of these pertaineth a spirit—gnome, sylph, salamander, ondine. By long and great study a scholar at last may perceive sylph or salamander. Such an one rises to strange wisdom.... The earth is not a plain as we were taught. Impossible for our human mind to conceive how it may be round, and yet the most learned hold that it is so. Holy Church denieth, _in toto_, the Antipodes, and one must walk warily. Yet, if it is fancied a square, there are difficulties. Aristotle—” Garin came even with him. “God save you, sir!” The black mantle started violently, returned the salutation, but looked around him nervously. Then, seeing in a neighbouring field half a dozen peasants, men and women, he recovered his equanimity. Moreover, when he looked at him closely, the youth had not the face of a robber. He addressed Garin in a slightly sing-song voice. “Do you know this road? How far is it to the town?” “I do not know the road. It is not much further, I think.” The man in the black mantle was a thin, pale, ascetic-looking person. He had a hungry look, or what, at first, Garin thought was such. The esquire had seen hungry men, peasants starved and wolfish, prisoners with a like aspect, fasting penitents. But it was the man’s eyes, Garin decided, that gave him the look, and it was not one of hunger for bread. They were large and clear, and they seemed to seek something afar.