's got the shakes
or suthin', an' I must take her to the doctor. Now look here--you look
like a nice kind of a young man. I know it's some kind of antiques and
horribles day 'round here, an' all the folks hes on funny clothes and
does nothin' on'y joke a body. But let's drop comical talk jest fer a
minute an' get down to sense, eh?"

She spoke pleadingly, and for a moment Jock looked puzzled. He only
understood a portion of what she was saying, but he realized that she
was in some sort of trouble.

"Why bait the man with silly questions, Rebecca," Phoebe broke in. "A
truce to this silly talk of apothecaries. I have no need of surgeons, I.
My good fellow," she continued, addressing Jock with an air of
condescension that dumfounded her sister, "is not yonder the Southwark
pillory?"

"Ay, mistress," he replied, with a grin. "It's there you may see the
selectman your serving-maid inquired for."

Rebecca gasped and clinched her hands fiercely on her bag and umbrella.

"Serving-maid!" she cried.

"Ahoy--whoop--room! Yi--ki yi!"

A swarm of small white animals ran wildly past them from behind, and
after them came a howling, laughing, scrambling mob that filled the
street. Someone had loosed a few score rabbits for the delight of the
rabble.

There was no time for reflection. With one accord, Jock and the two
women ran with all speed toward the pillory and the bridge, driven
forward by the crowd behind them. To have held their ground would have
been to risk broken bones at least.

Fortunately the hunted beasts turned sharply to the right and left at
the first cross street, and soon the three human fugitives could halt
and draw breath.

They found themselves in the outskirts of a crowd surrounding the
pillory, and above the heads of those in front they could see a huge red
face under a thatch of tousled hair protruding stiffly through a hole in
a beam supported at right angles to a vertical post about five feet
high. On each side of the head a large and dirty hand hung through an
appropriate opening in the beam.

Under the prisoner's head was hung an account of his misdeeds, placed
there by some of his cronies. These crimes were in the nature of certain
breaches of public decorum and decency, the details of which the
bystanders were discussing with relish and good-humor.

"Let's get out o' here," said Rebecca, suddenly, when the purport of
what she heard pierced her nineteenth-century understanding. "These
folks