ute
to Moll's abilities, "Judith Godwin must be able to read and write the
Moorish character and speak the tongue readily, answer aptly as to their
ways and habits, and to do these things beyond suspect. Moll must live
with these people for some months."

"God have mercy on us!" cries Jack. "Your honour is not for taking us to
Barbary."

"No," answers the Don, dryly, passing his long fingers with some
significance over the many seams in his long face, "but we must go where
the Moors are to be found, on the hither side of the straits."

"Well," says Dawson, "all's as one whither we go in safety if we're to
be out of our fortune for a year. There's nothing more for our Moll to
learn, I suppose, senor."

"It will not be amiss to teach her the manners of a lady," replies the
Don, rising and knitting his brows together unpleasantly, "and
especially to keep her feet under her chair at table."

With this he rings the bell for our reckoning, and so ends our
discussion, neither Dawson nor I having a word to say in answer to this
last hit, which showed us pretty plainly that in reaching round with her
long leg for our shins, Moll had caught the Don's shanks a kick that
night she was seized with a cough.

So to horse again and a long jog back to Greenwich, where Dawson and I
would fain have rested the night (being unused to the saddle and very
raw with our journey), but the Don would not for prudence, and
therefore, after changing our clothes, we make a shift to mount once
more, and thence another long horrid jolt to Edmonton very painfully.

Coming to the Bell (more dead than alive) about eight, and pitch dark,
we were greatly surprised that we could make no one hear to take our
horses, and further, having turned the brutes into the stable ourselves,
to find never a soul in the common room or parlour, so that the place
seemed quite forsaken. But hearing a loud guffaw of laughter from below,
we go downstairs to the kitchen, which we could scarce enter for the
crowd in the doorway. And here all darkness, save for a sheet hung at
the further end, and lit from behind, on which a kind of phantasmagory
play of Jack and the Giant was being acted by shadow characters cut out
of paper, the performer being hid by a board that served as a stage for
the puppets. And who should this performer be but our Moll, as we knew
by her voice, and most admirably she did it, setting all in a roar one
minute with some merry joke, and enchanting '