pirit of enthusiasm. Every
loft in Cheapside published its _Magnum Folium_ (or magazine)--of
its new blank verse; the Cheapside Players would produce anything on
sight as long as it "got away from those reactionary miracle plays,"
and the English Bible had run through seven "very large" printings in,
as many months.

So Wessel Caxter (who in his youth had gone to sea) was now a reader
of all on which he could lay his hands--he read manuscripts In holy
friendship; he dined rotten poets; he loitered about the shops where
the _Magna Folia_ were printed, and he listened tolerantly while
the young playwrights wrangled and bickered among them-selves, and
behind each other's backs made bitter and malicious charges of
plagiarism or anything else they could think of.

To-night he had a book, a piece of work which, though inordinately
versed, contained, he thought, some rather excellent political satire.
"The Faerie Queene" by Edmund Spenser lay before him under the
tremulous candle-light. He had ploughed through a canto; he was
beginning another:

THE LEGEND OF BRITOMARTIS OR OF CHASTITY

_It falls me here to write of Chastity.
The fayrest vertue, far above the rest_....

A sudden rush of feet on the stairs, a rusty swing-open of the thin
door, and a man thrust himself into the room, a man without a jerkin,
panting, sobbing, on the verge of collapse.

"Wessel," words choked him, "stick me away somewhere, love of Our
Lady!"

Caxter rose, carefully closing his book, and bolted the door in some
concern.

"I'm pursued," cried out Soft Shoes. "I vow there's two short-witted
blades trying to make me into mincemeat and near succeeding. They saw
me hop the back wall!"

"It would need," said Wessel, looking at him curiously, "several
battalions armed with blunderbusses, and two or three Armadas, to keep
you reasonably secure from the revenges of the world."

Soft Shoes smiled with satisfaction. His sobbing gasps were giving way
to quick, precise breathing; his hunted air had faded to a faintly
perturbed irony.

"I feel little surprise," continued Wessel.

"They were two such dreary apes."

"Making a total of three."

"Only two unless you stick me away. Man, man, come alive, they'll be
on the stairs in a spark's age."

Wessel took a dismantled pike-staff from the corner, and raising it to
the high ceiling, dislodged a rough trap-door opening into a garret
above.

"There's no ladder."

He moved a bench under