How so, sir? Did she change her determination?

_Fal._ No, Master Brook; but the peaking Cornuto her
husband, Master Brook, dwelling in a continual 'larum of
jealousy, comes me in the instant of our encounter, after 65
we had embraced, kissed, protested, and, as it were, spoke
the prologue of our comedy; and at his heels a rabble of
his companions, thither provoked and instigated by his
distemper, and, forsooth, to search his house for his wife's
love. 70

_Ford._ What, while you were there?

_Fal._ While I was there.

_Ford._ And did he search for you, and could not find
you?

_Fal._ You shall hear. As good luck would have it, 75
comes in one Mistress Page; gives intelligence of Ford's
approach; and, in her invention and Ford's wife's distraction,
they conveyed me into a buck-basket.

_Ford._ A buck-basket!

_Fal._ By the Lord, a buck-basket!--rammed me in with 80
foul shirts and smocks, socks, foul stockings, greasy napkins;
that, Master Brook, there was the rankest compound
of villanous smell that ever offended nostril.

_Ford._ And how long lay you there?

_Fal._ Nay, you shall hear, Master Brook, what I have 85
suffered to bring this woman to evil for your good. Being
thus crammed in the basket, a couple of Ford's knaves, his
hinds, were called forth by their mistress to carry me in the
name of foul clothes to Datchet-lane: they took me on their
shoulders; met the jealous knave their master in the door, 90
who asked them once or twice what they had in their
basket: I quaked for fear, lest the lunatic knave would
have searched it; but fate, ordaining he should be a cuckold,
held his hand. Well: on went he for a search, and
away went I for foul clothes. But mark the sequel, Master 95
Brook: I suffered the pangs of three several deaths; first,
an intolerable fright, to be detected with a jealous rotten
bell-wether; next, to be compassed, like a good bilbo, in
the circumference of a peck, hilt to point, heel to head;
and then, to be stopped in, like a strong distillation, with 100
stinking clothes that fretted in their own grease: think of
that,--a man of my kidney,--think of that,--that am as
subject to heat as butter; a man of continual dissolution
and thaw: it was a miracle to scape suffocation. And in
the height of this bath, when I was more than half stewed