John Gore passed by the Duke of Albemarle’s rooms, and entered the street by Holbein’s Gate. He walked under the windows of the Banqueting Hall, over the place where a king’s head had fallen, and turned in at the Palace Gate. He was strolling across the first court with the air of a man who wishes the whole world with the devil, when at the entry of the passage that ran past the Great Hall and the Chapel to Whitehall Stairs, he cannoned against an equally preoccupied person who came out by a side alley with a couple of books under his arm. “Pardon, sir; but may I remind you that God gave us eyes!” “Tu quoque, my friend; you have some weight behind those books, to judge by the dig in the ribs you gave me.” They stared at each other irritably for the moment, and then fell a-laughing like a couple of boys. “Bless my eyes, Jack Gore, but they are always playing me these scurvy tricks. I shall be kissing all my neighbors’ wives soon in mistake for my own.” “And no doubt the excuse will be useful, unless the husbands are fools.” “Ah, you dog! Remember my dignity, and in the public and august place. Where are you bound?” “Anywhere—and nowhere.” “The most devilish, dangerous course, John Gore, that a man can ever sail; it ends too often with places beginning with T and B. It also betokens a precarious state of mind, sir—a readiness to be made a fool of by a satin slipper or the turn of an ankle. I have had experience. Don’t laugh, you buccaneer. I am minded to take you under cover of my guns, and sail you into the country, where you can run into nothing more dangerous than a milkmaid with scarlet stockings.” Mr. Pepys insinuated a hand round John Gore’s arm, and turned him back in the direction of the Palace Gate. “Lest you find your way to the Stone Gallery, John, or to the bowers of the maids of honor, I will conduct you under escort as one who may prove an incorrigible vagrant. But to be most serious. Are you so incontinently idle and unoccupied?” “I am.” “Then you should be the very man for a fat and purblind friend who is driven to making pilgrimages on other people’s business. It is an error, sir, to be considered honest and good-tempered. How would a week’s saddle-shaking help your hunger. You have the took of a man too full of bile.” John Gore looked into Mr. Pepys’s florid, short-sighted, and shrewdly amiable face. “Are you going into the country?” “Yes, like a Jew to Babylon. For of all the things I abominate, John Gore, commend me to country inns and the sloughs that bumpkins call roads. Being plump, Jack, I am piteously popular with certain officious insects, and when I consider it, I am moved by the reflection that these insects might split their affections out of curtesy to a strapping sailor.” Mr. Pepys turned abruptly in his bustling way, dragging John Gore round by the elbow.