“You’re in the right, Senor.  Well, there’s Kit knows the language and can teach her a smattering of the Italian, I warrant, in no time.”

“Judith would probably know something of music,” pursues the Don.

“Why, Moll can play Kit’s fiddle as well as he.”

“But, above all,” continues the Don, as taking no heed of this tribute to Moll’s abilities, “Judith Godwin must be able to read and write the Moorish character and speak the tongue readily, answer aptly as to their ways and habits, and to do these things beyond suspect.  Moll must live with these people for some months.”

“God have mercy on us!” cries Jack.  “Your honour is not for taking us to Barbary.”

“No,” answers the Don, dryly, passing his long fingers with some significance over the many seams in his long face, “but we must go where the Moors are to be found, on the hither side of the straits.”

“Well,” says Dawson, “all’s as one whither we go in safety if we’re to be out of our fortune for a year.  There’s nothing more for our Moll to learn, I suppose, senor.”

“It will not be amiss to teach her the manners of a lady,” replies the Don, rising and knitting his brows together unpleasantly, “and especially to keep her feet under her chair at table.”

With this he rings the bell for our reckoning, and so ends our discussion, neither Dawson nor I having a word to say in answer to this last hit, which showed us pretty plainly that in reaching round with her long leg for our shins, Moll had caught the Don’s shanks a kick that night she was seized with a cough.

So to horse again and a long jog back to Greenwich, where Dawson and I would fain have rested the night (being unused to the saddle and very raw with our journey), but the Don would not for prudence, and therefore, after changing our clothes, we make a shift to mount once more, and thence another long horrid jolt to Edmonton very painfully.

Coming to the Bell (more dead than alive) about eight, and pitch dark, we were greatly surprised that we could make no one hear to take our horses, and further, having turned the brutes into the stable ourselves, to find never a soul in the common room or parlour, so that the place seemed quite forsaken.  But hearing a loud guffaw of laughter from below, we go downstairs to the kitchen, which we could scarce enter for the crowd in the doorway.  And here all darkness, save for a sheet hung at the further end, and lit from behind, on which a kind of phantasmagory play of Jack and the Giant was being acted by shadow characters cut out of paper, the performer being hid by a board that served as a stage for the puppets.  And who should this performer be but our Moll, as we knew by her voice, and most admirably she did it, setting all in a roar one minute with some merry joke, and enchanting ’em the next with a pretty song for the maid in distress.

We learnt afterwards that Moll, who could never rest still two minutes together, but must for ever be a-doing something new, had cut out her images and devised the show to entertain the servants in the kitchen, and that the guests above hearing their merriment had come down in time to get the fag end, which pleased them so vastly that they would have her play it all over again.