"Do not turn me away, sir!" moaned Hodge; "do not dismiss me from
your service because at last I have for once given the old hag a
good bruising. She has deserved it a long time, and an angel himself
must at last lose patience with her."
"I turn you out of my service!" exclaimed John Heywood, as he wiped
his eyes, wet with laughing. "No, Hodge, you are a real jewel, a
mine of fun and merriment; and you two have, without knowing it,
furnished me with the choicest materials for a piece which, by the
king's order, I have to write within six days. I owe you, then, many
thanks, and will show my gratitude forthwith. Listen well to me, my
amorous and tender pair of turtle-doves, and mark what I have to say
to you. One cannot always tell the wolf by his hide, for he
sometimes put on a sheep's skin; and so, too, a man cannot always be
recognized by his voice, for he sometimes borrows that of his
neighbor. Thus, for example, I know a certain John Heywood, who can
mimic exactly the voice of a certain little miss named Tib, and who
knows how to warble as she herself: 'Hodge, my dear Hodge!'" And he
repeated to them exactly, and with the same tone and expression, the
words that the voice had previously cried.
"Ah, it was you, sir?" cried Hodge, with a broad grin--"that Tib in
the court there, that Tib about whom we have been pummelling each
other?"
"I was Tib, Hodge--I who was present during the whole of your
quarrel, and found it hugely comical to send Tib's voice thundering
into the midst of our lovers' quarrel, like a cannon-stroke! Ah, ha!
Hodge, that was a fine bomb-shell, was it not? And as I said 'Hodge,
my dear Hodge,' you tumbled about like a kernel of corn which a
dung-beetle blows with his breath.
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