"I can tell you of one who will think evil; and that is my master. I can tell you of another; and that will be the sheriff, when I am haled before him." "You said just now--or my hearing played a trick--that your mistress had a liking for you." "And _you_ said, 'Evil be to him that evil thinks.' She hath a double chin, and owns to fifty-five." "What, chins!" "Years, years, master. Like a grandmother she dotes on me and looks after my morals. Nathless when you talk of Bankside----" The apprentice hesitated: in the dusk his shrewd young eyes glistened. "Say that I risk it?" He hesitated again. "Lads were not so cautious in my young days. I pay the shot, I tell you--a gentleman of Warwickshire and known to the College of Arms." "It standeth on Paul's Wharf and handy for the ferry to Bankside: but the College closes early on Christmas Eve, and the Heralds be all at holiday. An you think of pawning your coat-of-arms with them to raise the wind, never say that I let you take that long way round without warning." "Leave the cost to me, once more!" The countryman gazed down into the well of the theatre as if seeking an acquaintance among the figures below. "But what are they doing? What a plague means this hammering? A man cannot hear himself speak for it." "'Tis the play." "The play?" "The true play--the play you applauded: and writ by the same Will Shakespeare, they tell me--some share of it at least. Cometh he not, by the way, from your part of the world?" The countryman's eyes glistened in their turn: almost in the dusk they appeared to shine with tears. "Ay, I knew him, down in Warwickshire: a good lad he was, though his mother wept over him for a wild one. Hast ever seen a hen when her duckling takes to water? So it is with woman when, haply, she has hatched out genius." The apprentice slapped his leg. "I could have sworn it!" "Hey?" "Nay, question me not, master, for I cannot bring it to words. You tell me that you knew him: and I--on the instant I clapped eyes on you it seemed that somehow you were part of his world and somehow had belonged to him. Nearer I cannot get, unless you tell me more." "I knew him: to be sure, down in Warwickshire: but he has gone somedel beyond my ken, living in London, you see." "He goes beyond any man's kenning: he that has taught us to ken the world with new eyes. I tell you, master,"--the apprentice stretched out a hand,--"I go seeking him like one seeking a father who has begotten him into a new world, seeking him with eyes derived from him. Tell me----" But the countryman was leaning over the gallery-rail and scanning the pit again. He seemed a trifle bored by a conversation if not of less, then certainly of other, wit than he had bargained for. Somebody had drawn the curtains back from the stage, where the two lackeys who had decked the balcony with lanterns were busy now with crowbars, levering its wooden supports from their sockets.