It took him, maybe, forty seconds to reach the area. There already, stripped to the shirt, in a whirl of dust and voices, stood his friend waving a hammer and shouting down the loudest. The man was possessed, transformed, a Boanerges; his hammer, a hammer of Thor! He had caught it from the hand of a douce, sober-looking man in a plum-coloured doublet, who stood watching but taking no active share in the work. "By your leave, Sir!" "With or without my leave, good Sir, since you are determined to have it," said the quiet man, surrendering the hammer. The countryman snatched and thrust it between his knees while he stripped. Then, having spat on both hands, he grasped the hammer and tried its poise. "'Tis odd, now," said he, as if upon an afterthought, staring down on the quiet man, "but methinks I know your voice?" "Marry and there's justice in that," the quiet man answered; "for 'tis the ghost of one you drowned erewhile." III "Tom! What, Tom! Where be the others? I tell thee, Tom, there have been doings...." "Is that Dick Burbage?" A frail, thin windle-straw of a man came coughing across the foggy courtyard with a stable-lantern, holding it high. Its rays wavered on his own face, which was young but extraordinarily haggard, and on the piles of timber between and over which he picked his way--timbers heaped pell-mell in the slush of the yard or stacked against the boundary wall, some daubed with paint, others gilded wholly or in part, and twinkling as the lantern swung. "Dick Burbage already? Has it miscarried, then?" "Miscarried? What in the world was there to miscarry? I tell thee, Tom--but where be the others?" The frail man jerked a thumb at the darkness behind his shoulder. "Hark to them, back yonder, stacking the beams! Where should they be? and what doing but at work like galley-slaves, by the pace you have kept us going? Look around. I tell you from the first 'twas busy-all to get the yard clear between the wagons' coming, and at the fifth load we gave it up. My shirt clings like a dish-clout; a chill on this will be the death o' me. What a plague! How many scoundrels did you hire, that they take a house to pieces and cart it across Thames faster than we can unload it?" "That's the kernel of the story, lad. I hired the two-score rogues agreed on, neither more nor less: but one descended out of heaven and raised the number to twelve-score. Ten-score extra, as I am a sinner; and yet but one man, for I counted him. His name, he told me, was Legion." "Dick," said the other sadly, "when a sober man gives way to drinking--I don't blame you: and your pocket will be the loser more than all the rest if you've boggled to-night's work; but poor Cuthbert will take it to heart." "There was a man, I tell you----" "Tut, tut, pull yourself together and run back across bridge. Or let me go: take my arm now, before the others see you. You shall tell me on the way what's wrong at Shoreditch."