d it had fared hardly with roystering
Moll, had not a wedding and the arrest of a debtor presently distracted
the gaping idlers. As the mob turned to gaze at the fresh wonder, she
spurred her horse until she gained Newington by an unfrequented lane.
There she waited until night should cover her progress to Shoreditch,
and thus peacefully she returned home to lighten the vintner's pocket of
twenty pounds.

The fame of the adventure spread abroad, and that the scandal should
not be repeated Moll was summoned before the Court of Arches to answer a
charge of appearing publicly in mannish apparel. The august tribunal
had no terror for her, and she received her sentence to do penance in a
white sheet at Paul's Cross during morning-service on a Sunday with an
audacious contempt. 'They might as well have shamed a black dog as me,'
she proudly exclaimed; and why should she dread the white sheet,
when all the spectators looked with a lenient eye upon her professed
discomfiture?' For a halfpenny,' she said, 'she would have travelled
to every market-town of England in the guise of a penitent,' and having
tippled off three quarts of sack she swaggered to Paul's Cross in the
maddest of humours. But not all the courts on earth could lengthen her
petticoat, or contract the Dutch slop by a single fold. For a while,
perhaps, she chastened her costume, yet she soon reverted to the ancient
mode, and to her dying day went habited as a man.

As bear baiting was the passion of her life, so she was scrupulous in
the care and training of her dogs. She gave them each a trundle-bed,
wrapping them from the cold in sheets and blankets, while their food
would not have dishonoured a gentleman's table. Parrots, too, gave a
sense of colour and companionship to her house; and it was in this love
of pets, and her devotion to cleanliness, that she showed a trace of
dormant womanhood. Abroad a ribald and a scold, at home she was the
neatest of housewives, and her parlour, with its mirrors and its
manifold ornaments, was the envy of the neighbours. So her trade
flourished, and she lived a life of comfort, of plenty even, until the
Civil War threw her out of work. When an unnatural conflict set the
whole country at loggerheads, what occasion was there for the honest
prig? And it is not surprising that, like all the gentlemen adventurers
of the age, Moll remained most stubbornly loyal to the King's cause.
She made the conduit in Fleet Street run with wine wh