One May morning in the brave year 1594, Mistress Betty Hodges, from the threshold of the narrowest house in the narrowest of the narrow streets in the ancient parish of St. Helen's, Bishopsgate, observed with more than passing interest the movements of a gentleman in black. "Whist, neighbor!" she called out to Mistress Judd, whose portly person well-nigh filled a kindred doorway just across the street. "Yonder stranger should be by every sign in quest of lodgings, and by my horoscope this is a day most favorable for affairs of business. I pray thee, get thy knitting, lest he take us for no better than a pair of idle gossips." "In faith," retorted Mistress Judd, folding her arms complacently after a side glance in the loiterer's direction, "an he should ever lodge with thee let us hope his shillings prove more nimble than his feet." The gentleman indeed advanced with much deliberation, pausing from time to time to look about him as a man who balances advantages and disadvantages one against the other. It was a quaint old-mannered thoroughfare he moved in; a crooked street of overhanging eaves and jutting gable ends which nearly met against the sky; a shadowy, sunless, damp, ill-savored street, paved with round pebbles and divided in the middle by a trickling stream of unattractive water. For London, still in happy, dirty infancy, had yet to learn her lessons at the hands of those grim teachers, plague and fire. "A proper man enough!" Mistress Judd added, "though I'll warrant over-cautious and of no great quality. To me he looks a traveling leech." "Better a country student of divinity," suggested Mistress Hodges. "Or better, a minor cleric, or at best some writing-master," Mistress Judd opined. "Please God, then he can read," rejoined her neighbor, already debating within herself a small advance of rent. "Mayhap he might acquaint me whether those rolls of paper left by Master Christopher in his oaken chest be worth the ten shillings he died owing me." "An they would fetch as many pence," sniffed Mistress Judd, "our master poet had long ago resolved them into Malmsey." "Nay, speak not harshly of the dead," protested Mistress Hodges, conveying furtively a corner of her apron to one eye. "Marry, if Master Kit did sometimes sing o' nights 'twas but to keep the watch awake. I'd wipe my shutter clean and willingly to hear his merry catch again. Ah, he was ever free with money when he had it. And 'twas a pleasure to see him with his bottle. In faith, he'd speak to it and kiss it as a woman would her child." "And kiss it he did once too often, to my thinking," murmured Mistress Judd unsympathetically, "the night he got to brawling in the street and met his death."