with them and with their purses 'tis lightly come,
and lightly go. Also they spend freely, not knowing but each carouse may
be their last. But the thief-takers, instead of profiting by this
fair example, are for ever robbing the poor host. When noble or honest
travellers descend at our door, come the Provost's men pretending to
suspect them, and demanding to search them and their papers. To save
which offence the host must bleed wine and meat. Then come the excise to
examine all your weights and measures. You must stop their mouths with
meat and wine. Town excise. Royal excise. Parliament excise. A swarm
of them, and all with a wolf in their stomachs and a sponge in their
gullets. Monks, friars, pilgrims, palmers, soldiers, excisemen,
provost-marshals and men, and mere bad debtors, how can 'The White Hart'
butt against all these? Cutting no throats in self-defence as do your
'Swans' and 'Roses' and 'Boar's Heads' and 'Red Lions' and 'Eagles,'
your 'Moons,' 'Stars,' and 'Moors,' how can 'The White Hart' give a pint
of wine for a pint? And everything risen so. Why, lad, not a pound of
bread I sell but cost me three good copper deniers, twelve to the sou;
and each pint of wine, bought by the tun, costs me four deniers; every
sack of charcoal two sous, and gone in a day. A pair of partridges five
sous. What think you of that? Heard one ever the like? five sous for two
little beasts all bone and feather? A pair of pigeons, thirty deniers.
'Tis ruination!!! For we may not raise our pricen with the market. Oh,
no, I tell thee the shoe is trode all o' one side as well as pinches the
water into our eyn. We may charge nought for mustard, pepper, salt,
or firewood. Think you we get them for nought? Candle it is a sou the
pound. Salt five sous the stone, pepper four sous the pound, mustard
twenty deniers the pint; and raw meat, dwindleth it on the spit with no
cost to me but loss of weight? Why, what think you I pay my cook? But
you shall never guess. A HUNDRED SOUS A YEAR AS I AM A LIVING SINNER.

"And my waiter thirty sous, besides his perquisites. He is a hantle
richer than I am. And then to be insulted as well as pillaged. Last
Sunday I went to church. It is a place I trouble not often. Didn't the
cure lash the hotel-keepers? I grant you he hit all the trades, except
the one that is a byword for looseness, and pride, and sloth, to wit,
the clergy. But, mind you, he stripeit the other lay estates with a
feather, but us hotel-keep