Last Sunday I came - a Man whom the Lord God made - to the town of Flint, with it's great double walls and rounded bastions; may I see it all aflame! An obscure English wedding was there, with but little mead - an English feast! And I meant to earn a shining solid reward for my harper's art. So I began, with ready speed, to sing an ode to the kinsman; but all I got was mockery, spurning my song, and grief. It was easy for hucksters of barley and corn to dismiss all my skill, and they laughed at my artistry, my weel-prepared panegyric which they did not value; John of the Long Smock began to jabber of peas, and another about dung for his land. They all called for William the Piper to come to the table, a low fellow he must be. He came forward as though claiming his usual rights, though he did not look like a privileged man, with a groaning bag, a paunch of heavy guts, at the end of a stick between chest and arm. He rasped away, making startling grimaces, a horrid noise, from the swollen belly, bulging his eyes; he twisted his body here and there, and puffed his two cheeks out, playing with his fingers on a bell of hide - unsavoury conduct, fit for the unsavoury banqueters. He hunched his shoulders, amid the rout, under his cloak, like a worthless ballad-monger; he snorted away, and bowed his head untill it was on his breast, the very image of a kite with skillful zeal preening it's feathers. The pigmy puffed, making an outlandish cry, blowing out the bag with a loud howl; it sang like the buzzing of a hornet, that devilish bag with a stick in it's head, like a nightmare howl, fit to kill a mangy goose, like a sad bitch's hoarse howl in it's hollow kennel; a harsh paunch with monotonous cry, throat-muscles squeezing out a song, with a neck like a crane's where he plays, like a stabbed goose screeching aloud. There are voices in that hollow bag like the ravings of a thousand cats; a monotonous, wounded, ailing, pregnant goat - no pay for it's hire. After it ended it's wheezing note, that cold songstress whom love would shun, Will got his fee, namely bean-soup and pennies (if they paid) and sometimes small halfpennies, not the largess of princely hand, while I was sent away in high vezation from the silly feast all empty-handed. I solemnly vow, I do forswaer wretched Flint and all it's children, and it's wide hellish furnace, and it's English people and it's piper! That they should be slaughtered is all my prayer, my curse in their midst and on their children; sure, if I go there again, may I never return alive!