“This is but a mean mind of yours, mine host,” said the stranger; “I warrant me, all your town's folk do not think so basely. You have gallants among you, I dare undertake, that have made the Virginia voyage, or taken a turn in the Low Countries at least. Come, cudgel your memory. Have you no friends in foreign parts that you would gladly have tidings of?”
“Troth, sir, not I,” answered the host, “since ranting Robin of Drysandford was shot at the siege of the Brill. The devil take the caliver that fired the ball, for a blither lad never filled a cup at midnight! But he is dead and gone, and I know not a soldier, or a traveller, who is a soldier's mate, that I would give a peeled codling for.”
“By the Mass, that is strange. What! so many of our brave English hearts are abroad, and you, who seem to be a man of mark, have no friend, no kinsman among them?”
“Nay, if you speak of kinsmen,” answered Gosling, “I have one wild slip of a kinsman, who left us in the last year of Queen Mary; but he is better lost than found.”
“Do not say so, friend, unless you have heard ill of him lately. Many a wild colt has turned out a noble steed.—His name, I pray you?”
“Michael Lambourne,” answered the landlord of the Black Bear; “a son of my sister's—there is little pleasure in recollecting either the name or the connection.”
“Michael Lambourne!” said the stranger, as if endeavouring to recollect himself—“what, no relation to Michael Lambourne, the gallant cavalier who behaved so bravely at the siege of Venlo that Grave Maurice thanked him at the head of the army? Men said he was an English cavalier, and of no high extraction.”
“It could scarcely be my nephew,” said Giles Gosling, “for he had not the courage of a hen-partridge for aught but mischief.”
“Oh, many a man finds courage in the wars,” replied the stranger.
“It may be,” said the landlord; “but I would have thought our Mike more likely to lose the little he had.”