re Tom!' the Lincolnshire man grunted. 'Reckon you have no
money. Without groats and more ye shall get nowt to drink in Calais
town, save water. Water you may have in plenty.'

With a sigh the young Poins unbuckled his belt to get his papers.

'Money I have for you,' he said. 'A main of money.' He was engaged now
to pass words with this man--and he sighed again.

But Thomas Culpepper disregarded his words and his sigh. He was more
in the mood to talk Lincolnshire than Kent, for his fever had given
him a touch of homesickness and the young Poins to him was a very
foreigner. He shut his eyes to let the Lincolnshire gatewarden's words
go down to his brain; then with sudden violence he spat out:

'Give me water! What do ah ask but water! Pig! brood of a sow! gi'e me
water and choke!'

Nicholas Hogben fetched a leather bottle as long as his leg, dusty and
dinted, but nevertheless bedight with the arms of England, from the
stone recess where the guard sheltered at nights. He fitted it on to
the crook of his pike by the handle, and, craning over the drawbridge,
first smoothed away the leaf-green duck-weed on the moat and then sank
the bottle in the black water.

'I have money: a main of money for ye,' the young Poins said to Thomas
Culpepper; but the man, with his red beard and white face, swayed on
his legs and had ears only for the gurgling and gulping of the water
as it entered the bottle neck. The black jack swayed and jumped below
the bridge like a glistening water-beast.

He had little green spangles of duck-weed in his orange beard when he
took the bottle away, empty, from his mouth. He drew deep gasps of
breath, and suddenly sat down upon a squared block of stone that the
masons above were waiting to hoist into place over the archway.

'Good water!' he grunted to Hogben--grunting as all the Lincolnshire
men did, in those days, like a two-year hog.

'Bean't but that good in all Calais town!' Hogben grunted back to him.
'Curses on the two wurmen that sent me here.' And indeed, to
Lincolnshire men the water tasted good, since it reminded them of
their dyke water, tasting of marshweed and smelling of eggs.

'Tue wurmen!' Culpepper said lazily. 'Hast thou been jigging with _tue_
puticotties to wunst? One is enow to undo seven men. Who be 'hee?'

The young Poins, with a sulky sense of his importance, uttered:

'I have money for thee--a main of money!'

Culpepper looked at him with sleepy blue eyes.

'Thrice y