Leonardo da Vinci St John in the Wilderness painting

Leonardo da Vinci St John in the Wilderness paintingLeonardo da Vinci Madonna with the Yarnwinder paintingLeonardo da Vinci Portrait of Ginevra Benci painting
serve in that parlous hour to pacify the crowd, for whom difficult truths were best expressed in simple mottoes, simple rites. I surrendered my stick.
"Thank you," Bray said. "Please kneel." The crowd hushed; likewise my spirit, strait-waistcoated in contradictions of which, not impossibly, one tap of the stick might free me at last. I knelt.
"This is how it must be," Bray said, and smote me flat. Over me then, as I fought for breath (the blow had struck me full in the back, else my head would have been crushed), he declared through the public loudspeakers: "George Giles the Goat-Boy, cause and embodiment of all our ills: you are hereby denied admission to the student body. No probation; no reinstatement; no clemency. You shall be deported to the goat-barns at once, forever." The crowd shouted approval. Still stunned, I was snatched up. "Tomorrow morning," Bray announced to them, "I go to Founder's Hill to work certain miracles on the occasion of the scheduled Shafting, which you are all invited to witness. Now I shall retire into the Belly of WESCAC to meditate, but presently I shall come forth, ascend to the Belfry, and beget a son." He paused. "The Goat-Boy is yours."