They came chancing together one day into the broad thoroughfare of Cornhill, where, about the neighbourhood of the great conduit, near the east end, they halted and prepared for their parts. Here, hard by, stood the “tun,” or lock-up, a square detached building used for the temporary impounding of night offenders; and it may have been their contiguity to that place of ill savour which procured them the company which was responsible for their separation. Rogues gravitate of instinct towards the gallows, and your thief is never to be found hovering so certainly as about the buildings where Justice inhabits.
However that might be, and whether it were owing to the insolvency or the insensibility of his audience I cannot say; but the net result to the musician showed itself in such a beggarly taking, that he was driven to bring his performance to a short end, with a view to shifting his ground and endeavouring to discover a more profitable pitch. He loaded up Griselda and moved off, his expression, perhaps, reflecting the nature of his inward disappointment.
But he had not trudged fifty paces when his dismal preoccupation became conscious of a voice that pursued and arrested him.
“Hillo, my troll-away!”
He turned about, to see a figure approaching. It was that of a common young fellow, white-faced, dirty, but with a world of shifty cunning in his diminutive optics. His dress—some refuse of finery cheapened from the hangman—overhung his puny limbs, he had packthread in his shoes, and he wore his hat with a jack-a-dandy cock that did nothing but emphasize its extreme age and greasiness No one less unworldly than our musician would have stopped to parley with a creature so obviously questionable. But in truth Jack was, in the slang of the canting tribe, a born “buzzard,” or pigeon.
“What now?” demanded he.
“Heard ye,” said the stranger, coming up with a rather panting grin, “harping it yonder, over against lob’s pound; and, thinks I to myself, ‘Here be the very man for my master.’”
“What master?”
The stranger jerked his thumb over his shoulder.
“Salvator they call him—a great learned doctor.”