like to pick it up in a frippery warehouse, while the broker was looking another way; and, for the hawk’s eye you talk of, his was always after my stray spoons. He was tapster’s boy here in this blessed house for a quarter of a year; and between misreckonings, miscarriages, mistakes, and misdemeanours, had he dwelt with me for three months longer, I might have pulled down sign, shut up house, and given the devil the key to keep.”
“You would be sorry, after all,” continued the: traveller, were I to tell you poor Mike Lambourne was shot at the head of his regiment at the taking of a sconce near Maestricht?”
“Sorry!—it would be the blithest news I ever heard of him, since it would ensure me he was not hanged. But let him pass—I doubt his end will never do such credit to his friends: were it so, I should say”—(taking another cup of sack)—“Here’s God rest him, with all my heart.”
“Tush, man,” replied the traveller, “never fear: but you will have credit by your nephew yet, especially if he be the Michael Lambourne whom I knew, and loved very nearly, or altogether, as well as myself. Can you tell me no mark by which I could judge whether they be the same?”
“Faith, none that I can think of,” answered Giles Gosling, “unless that our Mike had the gallows branded on his left shoulder for stealing a silver candle-cup from Dame Snort of Hogsditch.”
“Nay, there you lie like a knave, uncle,” said the stranger, slipping aside his ruff, and turning down the sleeve of his doublet from his neck and
