t.'

Mistress Ruth Timewell stared at him in undisguised wonder. 'You may
think me ill-bred to say it, sir,' she remarked, 'but I cannot but
marvel where you have been, or what you have done all your life. Why,
the very children in the street have read these books.'

'In truth, such works come little in our way in London,' Sir Gervas
answered. 'A play of George Etherege's, or a jingle of Sir John
Suckling's is lighter, though mayhap less wholesome food for the mind.
A man in London may keep pace with the world of letters without
much reading, for what with the gossip of the coffee-houses and the
news-letters that fall in his way, and the babble of poets or wits
at the assemblies, with mayhap an evening or two in the week at the
playhouse, with Vanbrugh or Farquhar, one can never part company for
long with the muses. Then, after the play, if a man is in no humour for
a turn of luck at the green table at the Groom Porter's, he may stroll
down to the Coca Tree if he be a Tory, or to St. James's if he be a
Whig, and it is ten to one if the talk turn not upon the turning of
alcaics, or the contest between blank verse or rhyme. Then one may,
after an arriere supper, drop into Will's or Slaughter's and find Old
John, with Tickell and Congreve and the rest of them, hard at work
on the dramatic unities, or poetical justice, or some such matter. I
confess that my own tastes lay little in that line, for about that hour
I was likely to be worse employed with wine-flask, dice-box, or--'

'Hem! hem!' cried I warningly, for several of the Puritans were
listening with faces which expressed anything but approval.

'What you say of London is of much interest to me,' said the Puritan
maiden, 'though these names and places have little meaning to my
ignorant ears. You did speak, however, of the playhouse. Surely no
worthy man goes near those sinks of iniquity, the baited traps of the
Evil One? Has not the good and sanctified Master Bull declared from
the pulpit that they are the gathering-place of the froward, the chosen
haunts of the perverse Assyrians, as dangerous to the soul as any
of those Papal steeple-houses wherein the creature is sacrilegiously
confounded with the Creator?'

'Well and truly spoken, Mistress Timewell,' cried the lean young
Puritan upon the right, who had been an attentive listener to the whole
conversation. 'There is more evil in such houses than even in the cities
of the plain. I doubt not that the wrath of th