‘Ay,’ said Clerivault, with an answering smile, hearing the boy unable to suppress his merriment. ‘Only laugh small, if thou must laugh. When oldest age mates with youngest fashion, she rightly bears derision for her pains. Yet, for the fashion itself, it finds favour in exalted quarters.’ ‘What,’ said Brion: ‘those painted clogs?’ ‘Not clogs, my young master, but chopines so called--a fashion brought from Venice. You will see them once and again and mark their indication. She was a small lady, that, yet a great lady.’ ‘How, great, do you mean?’ ‘Why, by the altitude of her chopine, Sir, which was as much higher than a patten as her ladyship was above a fishwife. The measure of that folly is the measure of its wearer’s rank.’ ‘And does the Queen wear them?’ ‘God forbid! She would have to go on stilts by the token. But when I spoke of fashion, I meant these new-found farthingales, which, by’r lady, are the very nadir of inelegance. Well, there is virtue in them, they say; and what are we to carp at virtue, though in a fantastic form. Let our maids go ugly, so they go chaste.’ Brion was puzzled, but he said no more; and other distractions quickly engaged him. They were soon out of Westminster, going by the north bank of the river, and, making in a little the village of Chelsea--dear to bathers for its clear water and pleasant meadows--rode through it and in no long while after reached the ferry at Putney, where, at the cost of a halfpenny a head, they crossed the river into the Manor of Wimbledon, seeing some men net and haul in a brace of great salmon by the way. For the river here yielded not only that excellent fish, but eke much smelt, and an occasional sturgeon or porpoise, for which reason its waters were exceedingly prized by anglers. Thence, going over an extended heath in close order, they reached the royal town of Kingston, where, passing by the church--whose great paschal candle, once kept perpetually burning through the halfpennies of the faithful, the Reformation had at last extinguished--Brion saw the very stone on which the Anglo-Saxon Kings were wont to sit to receive their crowns, and was properly impressed though not excited thereby. And here, at the _Castle_ inn, they dined on calvered salmon and a huge baron of beef, with ale and sack to wash them down, after which the young gentleman rode so sleepily in his saddle that for miles he offered but a glazed eye to his surroundings, and only looked forward to bed and the journey’s end.