‘A dinner remembered,’ said he, ‘is a dinner discredited, and that forgotten as soon as eaten does best honour to the cook. For it is honour to be the begetter of generous thoughts, which spring from good digestion; and a man if he be fed well, and as a proper cook should desire him, ponders not on that he hath consumed, but rather on the great visions which arise from his content and satisfaction. Whereas, should the food itself linger in his mind, it is odds but what he will presently have cause to wish both it and himself at the devil. All human functions are tolerable only to the moment when one is conscious of them: and that is digestion, to which your cook is physician in trust, as it were, to prevent what the others seek to cure.’ ‘Methinks,’ said Brion, ‘the best physician is plainness and frugality. The Spartans lived on black broth alone, and were brave soldiers and healthy men.’ ‘Anan?’ said Phineas. ‘They were a race,’ answered the boy; and added, with a twinkle: ‘other than that one who, tasting their broth, declared he no longer wondered over their indifference to death, seeing that this was all they had to live for. Good Master Angell, too, was wont to say that Heaven blesses a simple appetite.’ Phineas struck his nose with his forefinger three several times. ‘These Churchmen,’ said he--‘they will dogmatise. What mandate had he from Heaven to speak for it? I could say that Heaven loves to encourage good eating; and could give you book for it too.’ ‘Give it,’ said Brion. ‘Hast heard of St Patrick,’ answered Phineas--‘the apostle of the Kerns? Well, God quit him for that--he was a good and holy man, for all he had his moments of weakness. One came to him on a fast day, when the sight of two fat pork chops on a platter was too much for his resolution. But he had no sooner helped himself thereto than, his conscience smiting him, with a prayer to Heaven for forgiveness he cast them from him into a pail of water standing by, whereon they were instantly converted, by God’s grace, into a brace of lusty trout. Nothing less, look you--no red herrings from Heaven. And what, I would ask you, of Cana its feast? Was it your black broth Christ changed the water into? Go to, for your plainness and frugality--and with your mouth full of my veal pasty!’ Brion laughed: ‘If it had been that to tempt St Patrick!’ He was popular with them all, as said: but with none so much as Clerivault, who regarded him as his especial trust and intimate, and was jealous of any fancied encroachment by another on his preserves. He taught the boy the use of arms, and practised him in sword play, against the time when he should have a ‘rapier and a baselard with a sheath of red’ of his own to hang at his side. That was a reminiscence not unreferred to, you may be sure. Brion, as he grew in confidence with this comrade, would open his sedate young heart to him, and ever a little and a little less shyly; until once he ventured on a direct question:--