bridegroom, both congenitally and wilfully miserable, and that of
the bride, broad as a harvest moon, and rosy almost to purple. The
bridegroom never smiled, and spoke with his jaws rather than his
lips; while the bride seldom uttered a syllable without grinning
from ear to ear, and displaying a marvellous appointment of huge and
brilliant teeth. Entering solemnly into the joke, Tom expressed
himself willing to marry the girl, but represented, as an
insurmountable difficulty, that he had no clothes for the occasion.
Thereupon the earl, drawing from his pocket his bunch of keys,
directed him to go and take what he liked from his wardrobe. Now the
earl was a man of large circumference, and the fool as lank in
person as in countenance.

Tom took the keys and was some time gone, during which many
conjectures were hazarded as to the style in which he would choose
to appear. When he re-entered the great hall, where the company was
assembled, the roar of laughter which followed his appearance made
the glass of its great cupola ring again. For not merely was he
dressed in the earl's beaver hat and satin cloak, splendid with
plush and gold and silver lace, but he had indued a corresponding
suit of his clothes as well, even to his silk stockings, garters,
and roses, and with the help of many pillows and other such farcing,
so filled the garments which otherwise had hung upon him like a
shawl from a peg, and made of himself such a 'sweet creature of
bombast' that, with ludicrous unlikeness of countenance, he bore in
figure no distant resemblance to the earl himself.

Meantime lady Elizabeth had been busy with the scullery-maid, whom
she had attired in a splendid brocade of her grandmother's, with all
suitable belongings of ruff, high collar, and lace wings, such as