He seems, moreover, to have been slightly deaf, long-necked,
hook-nosed, thickly bearded, and sullen of visage. He was remarkable
for a very expensive sort of boisterousness. He would play games of
chance with imaginary adversaries, with whom he would fall out, and in
fighting with which shadowy antagonists, he would injure or destroy the
furniture of a whole room. When his appetite prompted, he would break
open the dairy, swallow the new cheese-curds, destroy those he could
not devour, overthrow the cream-bowls, and then abscond for awhile to
Mansfield in Sherwood, till the short-lived anger of his master had
passed away. On hearing his patron praise a hawk which he possessed,
lean Leonard, taking the praise in a gastronomic sense, went and wrung
the hawk’s neck, and nearly choked himself by trying to devour it,
feathers and all. He seems to have been, at other times, employed in
carrying manure from the stables to the garden, in a barrow in which
he made his bed by night. One winter time, he showed his professional
wit by lighting a fire in his barrow, to warm himself by. The fire
seized on the barrow, and this, all in flames, he trundled into the
hall, among the men and maids, severely burning several of the latter,
and thence into the barn, which was filled with hay and straw, and
which was with difficulty saved from destruction. “The world laughed a
good deal at these jests,” says Robin,--which shows how mischief could
tickle it. The only anecdote I can find of Leonard which may be fairly
smiled at, is the one which tells us of a “country plow-jogger who,
coming behind Leonard with a lump of shoemaker’s wax in his hand, clapt
him on the head, and asked him how he did.” The fool felt the pitch
ball, and enraged at not being able to get rid of it, fell to furious
fight with the “plow-jogger,” who “belaboured the fool cunningly, and
got the fool’s head under his arm, and bobbed his nose. The fool,
remembering how his head was, strikes it up, and hits the fellow’s
mouth with the pitched place, so that the hair of his beard and the
hair of the clown’s head were glued together. The fellow cried, the
fool exclaimed, and could not suddenly part. In the end, the people,
after much laughing at the jest, let them part fair.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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