POINS. Come, you virtuous ass, you bashful fool, must you be blushing? Wherefore blush you now? What a maidenly man-at-arms are you become! Is ’t such a matter to get a pottle-pot’s maidenhead? PAGE. He calls me e’en now, my lord, through a red lattice, and I could discern no part of his face from the window. At last I spied his eyes, and methought he had made two holes in the ale-wife’s new petticoat and so peeped through. PRINCE. Has not the boy profited? BARDOLPH. Away, you whoreson upright rabbit, away! PAGE. Away, you rascally Althaea’s dream, away! PRINCE. Instruct us, boy; what dream, boy? PAGE. Marry, my lord, Althaea dreamt she was delivered of a firebrand; and therefore I call him her dream. PRINCE. A crown’s worth of good interpretation. There ’tis, boy. POINS. O, that this blossom could be kept from cankers! Well, there is sixpence to preserve thee. BARDOLPH. An you do not make him be hanged among you, the gallows shall have wrong. PRINCE. And how doth thy master, Bardolph? BARDOLPH. Well, my lord. He heard of your Grace’s coming to town. There’s a letter for you. POINS. Delivered with good respect. And how doth the martlemas, your master? BARDOLPH. In bodily health, sir. POINS. Marry, the immortal part needs a physician, but that moves not him. Though that be sick, it dies not. PRINCE. I do allow this wen to be as familiar with me as my dog, and he holds his place, for look you how he writes. POINS. [_Reads_.] “John Falstaff, knight,” Every man must know that, as oft as he has occasion to name himself: even like those that are kin to the King, for they never prick their finger but they say, “There’s some of the King’s blood spilt.” “How comes that?” says he that takes upon him not to conceive. The answer is as ready as a borrower’s cap, “I am the King’s poor cousin, sir.” PRINCE. Nay, they will be kin to us, or they will fetch it from Japhet. But to the letter: “Sir John Falstaff, knight, to the son of the King, nearest his father, Harry Prince of Wales, greeting.” POINS. Why, this is a certificate. PRINCE. Peace! “I will imitate the honourable Romans in brevity.” POINS. He sure means brevity in breath, short-winded. PRINCE. “I commend me to thee, I commend thee, and I leave thee. Be not too familiar with Poins, for he misuses thy favours so much that he swears thou art to marry his sister Nell. Repent at idle times as thou mayst, and so, farewell. Thine by yea and no, which is as much as to say, as thou usest him—Jack Falstaff with my familiars, John with my brothers and sisters, and Sir John with all Europe.” POINS. My lord, I’ll steep this letter in sack and make him eat it. PRINCE. That’s to make him eat twenty of his words. But do you use me thus, Ned? Must I marry your sister? POINS. God send the wench no worse fortune! But I never said so. PRINCE. Well, thus we play the fools with the time, and the spirits of the wise sit in the clouds and mock us. Is your master here in London?