"Avaunt! Thou art worse than I deemed thee, wretch! Cruel and
ignorant I knew thee,--and now mean and perfidious! I work with thee!
I commend to the earl a living disgrace to the name of scholar!
Never! If thou wantest bread and alms, those I can give, as a
Christian gives to want; but trust and honour, and learned repute and
noble toils, those are not for the impostor and the traitor. There,
there, there!" And he ran to the closet, took out a handful of small
coins, thrust them into the friar's hands, and, pushing him to the
door, called to the servants to see his visitor to the gates. The
friar turned round with a scowl. He did not dare to utter a threat,
but he vowed a vow in his soul, and went his way.

It chanced, some days after this, that Adam, in one of his musing
rambles about the precincts of the Tower, which (since it was not then
inhabited as a palace) was all free to his rare and desultory
wanderings, came by some workmen employed in repairing a bombard; and
as whatever was of mechanical art always woke his interest, he paused,
and pointed out to them a very simple improvement which would
necessarily tend to make the balls go farther and more direct to their
object. The principal workman, struck with his remarks, ran to one of
the officers of the Tower; the officer came to listen to the learned
man, and then went to the earl of Warwick to declare that Master
Warner had the most wonderful comprehension of military mechanism.
The earl sent for Warner, seized at once upon the very simple truth he
suggested as to the proper width of the bore, and holding him in
higher esteem than he had ever done before, placed some new cannon he
was constructing under his superintendence. As this care occupied but
little of his time, Warner was glad to show gratitude to the earl,
looking upon the destructive engines as mechanical contrivances, and
wholly unconscious of the new terror he gave to his name.