"Your speech belies you, sir," retorted Master Francis courteously, "for it proclaims a man of nice discrimination. I could swear you are a doctor of the law."
"Then would you be forsworn," replied the other, laughing, "for, by the grace of God, I am near kinsman to the dancing poodle of a country fair. Come any afternoon at three o'clock to the Curtain Play-house at Shoreditch, and there for sixpence you may see my antics."
"Ah, then you are a player!" Master Francis cried, well pleased.
"For the lack of a more honest calling," his companion answered with a gesture as who should say, "Tell me where can be found an honester?"
"Then we are in like case," laughed Master Francis. "Fere totus mundus exercet histrionem, says Phædrus; or as one might put it bluntly, 'All the world's a stage.'"
"Methinks our English hath the better jingle," commented the player. "Would that some wordsmith might e'en recoin these ancient mintages to fill the meager purses of our mouths!"
They had come now to the broad low archway leading to the courtyard of the Bull, and passing in beneath its shadow, Master Francis recalled the plays he had witnessed there in boyhood.
"Ah," said his companion, "'tis not so long since we poor players hung our single rag of curtain where we might. Now we have playhouses of our own, and when the servants of the Lord Chamberlain shall occupy the Globe at Bankside, you shall see how plays may be presented. But Navita de ventis de tauris narrat orator, as thy gossip Propertius hath it, though I like best the homely adage, 'A tinker will talk of his trade.'"
They found the seaman in the little room behind the tap, a veritable high priest of some mystic cult in dignity. He bowed a hearty welcome to the visitors and presently made clear to them the true relationship between his pot of dried tobacco and the earthen pipe bowls at the ends of hollow reeds. He cautioned them to have a care, when the coal of fire was applied, not to draw the smoke into their mouths too suddenly and fall to coughing. He was a swarthy man, with brass rings in his ears and long hair braided in a queue behind, and his account of the savage king held captive until the inner secrets of the art of smoking were revealed by way of ransom was in itself a yarn well worth his fee.