If you are not for me, avaunt! avoid, Satan! For I swear by my great-grandmother's placket (and that's a horrid oath), that if you don't help me to solve that puzzling problem, I will, nay, I already do repent having proposed it; for still I must remain nettled and gravelled, and a devil a bit I know how to get off.

Well, what say you?
I'faith, I begin to smell you out.

You are not yet disposed to give me an answer; nor I neither, by these whiskers.

Yet to give some light into the business, I'll e'en tell you what had been anciently foretold in the matter by a venerable doctor, who, being moved by the spirit in a prophetic vein, wrote a book ycleped the Prelatical Bagpipe.

What d'ye think the old fornicator saith?
Hearken, you old noddies, hearken now or never.
The jubilee's year, when all like fools were shorn, Is about thirty supernumerary.
O want of veneration! fools they seemed, But, persevering, with long breves, at last No more they shall be gaping greedy fools.
For they shall shell the shrub's delicious fruit, Whose flower they in the spring so much had feared.
Now you have it, what do you make on't?
The seer is ancient, the style laconic, the sentences dark like those of Scotus, though they treat of matters dark enough in themselves.