It was no affair for the watch: Satan was at large tonight and Satan seemed to be he who appeared dimly in front, heel over gate, knee over fence. Moreover, the adversary was obviously travelling near home or at least in that section of London consecrated to his coarser whims, for the street narrowed like a road in a picture and the houses bent over further and further, cooping in natural ambushes suitable for murder and its histrionic sister, sudden death. Down long and sinuous lanes twisted the hunted and the harriers, always in and out of the moon in a perpetual queen’s move over a checker-board of glints and patches. Ahead, the quarry, minus his leather jerkin now and half blinded by drips of sweat, had taken to scanning his ground desperately on both sides. As a result he suddenly slowed short, and retracing his steps a bit scooted up an alley so dark that it seemed that here sun and moon had been in eclipse since the last glacier slipped roaring over the earth. Two hundred yards down he stopped and crammed himself into a niche in the wall where he huddled and panted silently, a grotesque god without bulk or outline in the gloom. Flowing Boots, two pairs, drew near, came up, went by, halted twenty yards beyond him, and spoke in deep-lunged, scanty whispers: “I was attune to that scuffle; it stopped.” “Within twenty paces.” “He’s hid.” “Stay together now and we’ll cut him up.” The voice faded into a low crunch of a boot, nor did Soft Shoes wait to hear more--he sprang in three leaps across the alley, where he bounded up, flapped for a moment on the top of the wall like a huge bird, and disappeared, gulped down by the hungry night at a mouthful. II “_He read at wine, he read in bed, He read aloud, had he the breath, His every thought was with the dead, And so he read himself to death._” Any visitor to the old James the First graveyard near Peat’s Hill may spell out this bit of doggerel, undoubtedly one of the worst recorded of an Elizabethan, on the tomb of Wessel Caster. This death of his, says the antiquary, occurred when he was thirty-seven, but as this story is concerned with the night of a certain chase through darkness, we find him still alive, still reading. His eyes were somewhat dim, his stomach somewhat obvious--he was a mis-built man and indolent--oh, Heavens! But an era is an era, and in the reign of Elizabeth, by the grace of Luther, Queen of England, no man could help but catch the spirit of enthusiasm. Every loft in Cheapside published its _Magnum Folium_ (or magazine)--of its new blank verse; the Cheapside Players would produce anything on sight as long as it “got away from those reactionary miracle plays,” and the English Bible had run through seven “very large” printings in as many months.