[Exit.]

Scene 5.  A room in the Garter Inn.

[Enter host and simple.]

Host.
What wouldst thou have, boor?  What, thick-skin?  Speak, breathe,
discuss; brief, short, quick, snap.

Simple. 
Marry, sir, I come to speak with Sir John Falstaff from Master Slender.

Host. There’s his chamber, his house, his castle, his standing-bed and truckle-bed; ’tis painted about with the story of the Prodigal, fresh and new.  Go knock and call; he’ll speak like an Anthropophaginian unto thee; knock, I say.

Simple.  There’s an old woman, a fat woman, gone up into his chamber; I’ll be so bold as stay, sir, till she come down; I come to speak with her, indeed.

Host.
Ha! a fat woman?  The knight may be robbed.  I’ll call.  Bully knight! 
Bully Sir John!  Speak from thy lungs military.  Art thou there?  It
is thine host, thine Ephesian, calls.

Falstaff.
[Above] How now, mine host?

Host.
Here’s a Bohemian-Tartar tarries the coming down of thy fat woman. 
Let her descend, bully, let her descend; my chambers are honourible. 
Fie! privacy? fie!

[Enter Falstaff.]

Falstaff. 
There was, mine host, an old fat woman even now with, me; but
she’s gone.

Simple. 
Pray you, sir, was’t not the wise woman of Brainford?

Falstaff. 
Ay, marry was it, mussel-shell:  what would you with her?

Simple.  My master, sir, my Master Slender, sent to her, seeing her go thorough the streets, to know, sir, whether one Nym, sir, that beguiled him of a chain, had the chain or no.

Falstaff. 
I spake with the old woman about it.

Simple. 
And what says she, I pray, sir?

Falstaff. 
Marry, she says that the very same man that beguiled Master Slender
of his chain cozened him of it.

Simple. 
I would I could have spoken with the woman herself; I had other
things to have spoken with her too, from him.

Falstaff. 
What are they?  Let us know.

Host.
Ay, come; quick.

Simple. 
I may not conceal them, sir.

Falstaff. 
Conceal them, or thou diest.

Simple. 
Why, sir, they were nothing but about Mistress Anne Page:  to know
if it were my master’s fortune to have her or no.

Falstaff. 
’Tis, ’tis his fortune.

Simple. 
What sir?

Falstaff. 
To have her, or no.  Go; say the woman told me so.

Simple. 
May I be bold to say so, sir?

Falstaff. 
Ay, Sir Tike; like who more bold?

Simple. 
I thank your worship; I shall make my master glad with these tidings.