John Ball laughed. “Great is my harvest of riddles to-night,” said he; “for even if a man sleep not, and eat and drink while he is a-working, ye shall but make two men, or three at the most, out of him.”
Said I: “Sawest thou ever a weaver at his loom?”
“Yea,” said he, “many a time.”
He was silent a little, and then said: “Yet I marvelled not at it; but now I marvel, because I know what thou wouldst say. Time was when the shuttle was thrust in and out of all the thousand threads of the warp, and it was long to do; but now the spring-staves go up and down as the man’s feet move, and this and that leaf of the warp cometh forward and the shuttle goeth in one shot through all the thousand warps. Yea, so it is that this multiplieth a man many times. But look you, he is so multiplied already;
