Were you that chance to read never eighteen and thought you not well of yourself, having a new sword? If not, the Lord pity you. It is little ye ken. But all the while I longed to hear more of Sir Thomas Tode, and if it might be, to see him. So I asked of the lady of the pans where her husband was. She set her thumb over her shoulder, pointing to a narrow door as of an aumrie or wall press. ’He is in there,’ she said shortly. ’And what else is there in there?’ said I, laughing, for what was I the wiser? ’Half a bullock is in there,’ she said, laughing also. ’That is the meat-cupboard. It is fine and caller, and he is not troubled with flies upon his miserable bald head.’ ’The meat-safe,’ cried I, much astonished; ’and what does a reverend chaplain and a knight in the meat-safe?’ ’The old dotard will not quit his maundering about the Black Vaut of Dunure to every one that comes near. He got hold of a silly chapman in the yard that came with fish from Ayr, and I declare he must sit down and prate by the hour of the Black Vaut of Dunure. So I shut him up in the meat-safe. Faith, I will give him Black Vaut of Dunure ere I have done with him. The Black Vaut of Cassillis and the company of the dinner roast will set him better.’ ’And what says my lord to your using his chaplain so?’ The lady gazed at me a moment in a kind of wilderment. Then she broke into the vulgar speech of the country, which, because I learned to write English as those at the Queen’s Court do, I have used but seldom in this chronicle—though, of course, not for lack of knowledge. ’Sain me,’ she said, ’this may be a queer, uncanny world, but it is surely no come to that o’t yet, that a wife mauna check and chastise her ain man. Guid Lord, no—life wadna be worth leevin’—see till this—’ she said. And taking a key from her pocket she rapidly unlocked the door of the meat-closet. Sir Thomas was discovered sitting most forlornly within, upon the corner of a great chest, with many pieces of meat depending from hooks about his head. His wife, reaching in from the step, took him by the top-knot of hair as by a handle, and pulled him out upon the floor of the kitchen with one movement of her arm. ’It’s a guid’s mercy,’ she cried, ’that yince ye war a papish monk wi’ a shaven crown, for the place that ye keepit bare sae lang has ripened late, after a’ the lave o’ the crap has been blawn awa’ wi’ the wind.’ I had been endeavouring to explain to myself the strangeness of the wisp upon Sir Thomas’s head, but the words of his wife made clear the matter. It was but the retarded growth of his long fallow tonsure. ’An’ it’s a de’il o’ a queer thing,’ said Mistress Tode, ’that turning your coat ootside in should turn your hair inside oot! Heard ye ever the mak’ o’ that?’ ’It was all owing to—’ began Sir Thomas Tode, looking at his wife with a cringing shamefacedness that was most entertaining.