"Marry, if Master Kit did sometimes sing o' nights 'twas but to keep the watch awake. I'd wipe my shutter clean and willingly to hear his merry catch again. Ah, he was ever free with money when he had it. And 'twas a pleasure to see him with his bottle. In faith, he'd speak to it and kiss it as a woman would her child."
"And kiss it he did once too often, to my thinking," murmured Mistress Judd unsympathetically, "the night he got to brawling in the street and met his death."
"Marry, he was no brawler," Mistress Hodges protested warmly, "but ever cheerfullest when most in drink. They were thieving knaves who set upon him, and, God be good to sinners, ran him through the heart before the poor young man could so much as recite a couplet to prove himself a poet."
"How thinkst thou poetry would save him?" Mistress Judd demanded curtly.
"Marry, come up! What thief would kill a poet for his purse?" cried Mistress Hodges. "Quick, neighbor, get thy knitting!" she added hurriedly, and catching up a pewter plate began to polish with her apron as the stranger, attracted by their chatter, quickened his pace.
He was a slight man, apparently of thirty or thereabout, with deep-set, penetrating eyes and a lean face ending in the short, sharp, pointed beard in fashion at the time.
"Give you good-morrow, dames," he said, when within speaking distance; "can you direct me to some proper lodging here-about?"
Mistress Hodges dropped a deeper courtesy to draw attention to herself as the person of most importance.
"In truth an't please you, sir," she said, "'tis my good fortune to have this moment ready for your worship the fairest chambers to be had in all the town at four and six the week. Gentility itself could ask no better, for doth not the Lord Mayor live around the corner in his newly purchased Crosby Hall, the tallest house in London, and near at hand do not the gardens of Sir John Gresham stretch from Bishopsgate to Broad Street like a park? And if one would seek recreation, 'tis not five minutes to Cornhill, which is amusing as a fair o' pleasant evenings, with the jugglers and peddlers and goldsmiths and——"