But attic dwellers stave off many a woe with empty stomachs and stout courage.  When April came, boats for the fur-trade should have been stirring, and my Lord Preston changes his tune.  One night, when Pierre Radisson sat spinning his yarns of captivity with Iroquois to our attic neighbours, comes a rap at the door, and in walks Captain Godey of the English Embassy.  As soon as our neighbours had gone, he counts out one hundred gold pieces on the table.  Then he hands us a letter signed by the Duke of York, King Charles’s brother, who was Governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company, granting us all that we asked.

Thereupon, Pierre Radisson asks leave of the French court to seek change of air; but the country air we sought was that of England in May, not France, as the court inferred.

[1] The reference is evidently to the secret treaty by which King Charles of England received annual payment for compliance with King Louis’s schemes for French aggression.

CHAPTER XXIV

UNDER THE AEGIS OF THE COURT

The roar of London was about us.

Sign-boards creaked and swung to every puff of wind.  Great hackney-coaches, sunk at the waist like those old gallipot boats of ours, went ploughing past through the mud of mid-road, with bepowdered footmen clinging behind and saucy coachmen perched in front.  These flunkeys thought it fine sport to splash us passers-by, or beguiled the time when there was stoppage across the narrow street by lashing rival drivers with their long whips and knocking cock-hats to the gutter.  ’Prentices stood ringing their bells and shouting their wares at every shop-door.  “What d’ye lack?  What d’ye lack?  What d’ye please to lack, good sirs?  Walk this way for kerseys, sayes, and perpetuanoes!  Bands and ruffs and piccadillies!  Walk this way!  Walk this way!”

“Pardieu, lad!” says M. Radisson, elbowing a saucy spark from the wall for the tenth time in as many paces.  “Pardieu, you can’t hear yourself think!  Shut up to you!” he called to a bawling ’prentice dressed in white velvet waistcoat like a showman’s dummy to exhibit the fashion.  “Shut up to you!”

And I heard the fellow telling his comrades my strange companion with the tangled hair was a pirate from the Barbary States.  Another saucy vender caught at the chance.

“Perukes!  Perukes!  Newest French periwigs!” he shouts, jangling his bell and putting himself across M. Radisson’s course.  “You’d please to lack a periwig, sir!  Walk this way!  Walk this way—­”

“Out of my way!” orders Radisson with a hiss of his rapier round the fellow’s fat calves. “’Tis a milliner’s doll the town makes of a man!  Out of my way!”