burner. Give him my name, good sir,
the name of Peter the fuller, of Lymington, and ask him for a change of
raiment, that I may pursue my journey without delay. There are reasons
why he would be loth to refuse me."

Alleyne started off along the path indicated, and soon found the log-hut
where the burner dwelt. He was away faggot-cutting in the forest, but
his wife, a ruddy bustling dame, found the needful garments and tied
them into a bundle. While she busied herself in finding and folding
them, Alleyne Edricson stood by the open door looking in at her with
much interest and some distrust, for he had never been so nigh to a
woman before. She had round red arms, a dress of some sober woollen
stuff, and a brass brooch the size of a cheese-cake stuck in the front
of it.

"Peter the fuller!" she kept repeating. "Marry come up! if I were Peter
the fuller's wife I would teach him better than to give his clothes to
the first knave who asks for them. But he was always a poor, fond, silly
creature, was Peter, though we are beholden to him for helping to bury
our second son Wat, who was a 'prentice to him at Lymington in the year
of the Black Death. But who are you, young sir?"

"I am a clerk on my road from Beaulieu to Minstead."

"Aye, indeed! Hast been brought up at the Abbey then. I could read it
from thy reddened cheek and downcast eye. Hast learned from the monks, I
trow, to fear a woman as thou wouldst a lazar-house. Out upon them! that
they should dishonor their own mothers by such teaching. A pretty world
it would be with all the women out of it."

"Heaven forfend that such a thing should come to pass!" said Alleyne.

"Amen and amen! But thou art a pretty lad, and the prettier for thy
modest ways. It is easy to see from thy cheek that thou hast not spent
thy days in the rain and the heat and the wind, as my poor Wat hath been
forced to do."

"I have indeed seen little of life, good dame."

"Wilt find nothing in it to pay for the loss of thy own freshness. Here
are the clothes, and Peter can leave them when next he comes this way.
Holy Virgin! see the dust upon thy doublet! It were easy to see that
there is no woman to tend to thee. So!--that is better. Now buss me,
boy."

Alleyne stooped and kissed her, for the kiss was the common salutation
of the age, and, as Erasmus long afterwards remarked, more used in
England than in any other country. Yet it sent the blood to his temples
again, and he wondered, as he t