PETER PLOD-ALL. Marry, sir, I hear you're a very cunning man, sir, and sir reverence of your worship, sir, I am going a-wooing to one Mistress Lelia, a gentlewoman here hard by. Pray ye, sir, tell me how I should behave myself, to get her to my wife, for, sir, there is a scholar about her; now, if you can tell me how I should wipe his nose of her, I would bestow a fee of you.
ROBIN GOODFELLOW. Let me see't, and thou shalt see what I'll say to thee. [He gives him money.] Well, follow my counsel, and, I'll warrant thee, I'll give thee a love-powder for thy wench, and a kind of nux vomica in a potion shall make her come off, i' faith.
PETER PLOD-ALL. Shall I trouble you so far as to take some pains with me? I am loth to have the dodge.
ROBIN GOODFELLOW. Tush! fear not the dodge. I'll rather put on my flashing red nose and my flaming face, and come wrapped in a calf's skin, and cry Bo bo. I'll fray the scholar, I warrant thee. But first go to her, try what thou canst do; perhaps she'll love thee without any further ado. But thou must tell her thou hast a good stock, some hundred or two a year, and that will set her hard, I warrant thee; for, by the mass, I was once in good comfort to have cosened a wench, and wott'st thou what I told her? I told her I had a hundred pound land a year in a place, where I have not the breadth of my little finger. I promised her to enfeoff her in forty pounds a year of it, and I think of my conscience, if I had had but as good a face as thine, I should have made her have cursed the time that ever she see it. And thus thou must do: crack and lie, and face, and thou shalt triumph mightily.
PETER PLOD-ALL. I need not do so, for I may say, and say true, I have lands and living enough for a country fellow.
ROBIN GOODFELLOW. By'r Lady, so had not I. I was fain to overreach, as many times I do; but now experience hath taught me so much craft that I excel in cunning.
PETER PLOD-ALL. Well, sir, then I'll be bold to trust to your cunning, and so I'll bid you farewell, and go forward. I'll to her, that's flat.
ROBIN GOODFELLOW.
Do so, and let me hear how you speed.
PETER PLOD-ALL.
That I will, sir. [Exit PETER.
ROBIN GOODFELLOW. Well, a good beginning makes a good end. Here's ten groats for doing nothing. I con Master Churms thanks for this, for this was his device; and therefore I'll go seek him out, and give him a quart of wine, and know of him how he deals with the scholar. [Exit.