pestilent, prating, pragmatical rascals.'

'Ha! Called you pragmatical, Nick?' Puck started up. 'High time Oliver
came to purge the land! How did you and honest Jack fare next?'

'We were in some sort constrained to each other's company. I was for
going to my house in Spitalfields, he would go to his parish in Sussex;
but the plague was broke out and spreading through Wiltshire, Berkshire,
and Hampshire, and he was so mad distracted to think that it might even
then be among his folk at home that I bore him company. He had comforted
me in my distress. I could not have done less; and I remembered that I
had a cousin at Great Wigsell, near by Jack's parish. Thus we footed it
from Oxford, cassock and buff coat together, resolute to leave wars on
the left side henceforth; and either through our mean appearances, or
the plague making men less cruel, we were not hindered. To be sure, they
put us in the stocks one half-day for rogues and vagabonds at a village
under St Leonard's forest, where, as I have heard, nightingales never
sing; but the constable very honestly gave me back my Astrological
Almanac, which I carry with me.' Mr Culpeper tapped his thin chest. 'I
dressed a whitlow on his thumb. So we went forward.

'Not to trouble you with impertinences, we fetched over against Jack
Marget's parish in a storm of rain about the day's end. Here our roads
divided, for I would have gone on to my cousin at Great Wigsell, but
while Jack was pointing me out his steeple, we saw a man lying drunk,
as he conceived, athwart the road. He said it would be one Hebden, a
parishioner, and till then a man of good life; and he accused himself
bitterly for an unfaithful shepherd, that had left his flock to follow
princes. But I saw it was the plague, and not the beginnings of it
neither. They had set out the plague-stone, and the man's head lay on
it.'

'What's a plague-stone?' Dan whispered.

'When the plague is so hot in a village that the neighbours shut the
roads against 'em, people set a hollowed stone, pot, or pan, where such
as would purchase victual from outside may lay money and the paper of
their wants, and depart. Those that would sell come later--what will
a man not do for gain?---snatch the money forth, and leave in exchange
such goods as their conscience reckons fair value. I saw a silver groat
in the water, and the man's list of what he would buy was rain-pulped in
his wet hand.

'"My wife! Oh, my wife and babes!" says Jack