en Elizabeth. About eight
o'clock, while I stood, as was my wont, setting types in my master's
shop, I looked from the window (as was also my wont), and spied two
falconers in their green coats, with a trumpeter riding in the midst,
ambling citywards. In a moment I dropped my stick (and with it, alack!
a pieful of my master's types), and was out, cap and club, in the
Strand, shouting till I was hoarse, "God save her Majesty!"

On the instant, from every shop far and near, darted 'prentices and
journeymen, shouting and waving caps--some because they saw me do so,
some because they guessed what was afoot, some because they saw, even
now, the flutter of approaching pennons, and caught the winding of the
royal huntsmen's horns along the Strand.

The Queen was coming!

I went mad that day with loyalty. I kicked my fellows for not shouting
louder, and such as shouted not at all, I made to shout in a way they
least expected. Through the open door of Master Straw's, the
horologer's, I spied his two 'prentices, deaf to all the clamour, basely
gorging a hasty pudding behind the bench.

"What!" shouted I, bursting in upon them, and seizing each by his
cropped head, "what, ye gluttonous pair of porkers, is this the way you
welcome her Majesty into our duchy? Is this a time for greasy pudding
and smacking of lips? Come outside and shout, or I'll brain you with
your own spoons."

Whereupon, forgetting what I did, I dipped the white face of each in his
own mess, and dragged them forth, where, to do them justice, they
shouted and howled as loud as any one.

And now the Strand overflowed from end to end with loyal citizens. From
the windows above, the faces of the city madams beamed, and the white
necks of their daughters craned; while behind, with half an eye on us
clubs below, peeped, on tiptoe, the maids. At each shop-door stood the
grave forms of our masters, thinking, perhaps, of a lost day's profits,
and setting the cost thereof against the blessings of her Majesty's
happy reign. At the roadside, beggar, scholar, yokel, knight, and noble
jostled in a motley throng. But the sight of all that crowd was the
'prentices, who swarmed out into the road, and raised our shouts above
the clanging of Saint Clement's bells and the trumpets of the Royal
servants. 'Twas no pageant we had come out to see. Giants, and whales,
and bottomless pits, and salvage men, and the like we could see to our
hearts' content on Lord Mayor's