again. He
felt the stifling presence of encircling walls, and longed to get
out into the starlit night.

"The streets are none too safe at night for peaceful citizens,"
remarked Master Cale, with a shake of the head. "But I have a
peruke to take to a client who lives hard by Snowe Hill. If you
needs must go, let us go together; and gird on yonder sword ere you
start. For if men walk unarmed in the streets of a night, they are
thought fair game for all the rogues and bullies who prowl from
tavern to tavern seeking for diversion. They do not often attack an
armed man; but a quiet citizen who has left his sword behind him
seldom escapes without a sweating, if nothing worse befall him."

"And what is this sweating?" asked Tom, as the pair sallied forth
into the darkness of the streets.

Here and there an oil lamp shed a sickly glow for a short distance;
but, for the most part, the streets were very dim and dark. Lights
gleamed in a good many upper windows still; but below--where the
shutters were all up--darkness and silence reigned.

"Sweating," answered Cale, "is a favourite pastime with the bullies
of London streets. A dozen or more with drawn swords surround a
hapless and unarmed passer by. They will close upon him in a
circle, the points of their swords towards him, and then one will
prick him in the rear, causing him to turn quickly round, whereupon
another will give him a dig in the same region, and again he will
jump and face about; and so they will keep the poor fellow spinning
round and round, like a cockchafer on a pin, until the sweat pours
off him, and they themselves are weary of the sport. But, hist! I
hear a band of them coming. Slip we into this archway, and let them
pass by. I would not have my wig box snatched away; and there is no
limit to the audacity of those bully beaux when they have drunk
enough to give them Dutch courage. Discretion is sometimes better
than valour."

So saying, he pulled Tom into a dark recess, and in a few minutes
more there swaggered past about six or eight young roisterers--
singing, swearing, joking, threatening--more or less intoxicated
every one of them, and boasting themselves loudly of the valiant
deeds they could and would do.

They did not see the two figures in the archway. Indeed, the
greatest safety of the belated citizen was that these bullies were
generally too drunk to be very observant, and that a person in
hiding could generally escape notice. After they