which we had just received. And as it was our intent to be right merry with each other, we turned in to the best inn, and had minstrels sent for, to play our wine and beer down our throat. So we fell to drinking and roaring; and no sport was wanting, which could make the money fly: nay, I invited also lads from other regiments to be my guests, and so carried myself as a young prince who has command of land and folk and great sums to spend by the year. And thus we fared better than was pleasing to a company of troopers who sat there also at table, but with no such mad tricks as we. So, being angry, they began to jest upon us, “How comes it,” said they to one another, “that these prop-hoppers”
23 (for they took us for musketeers, seeing that no animal in the world is more like a musketeer than is a dragoon, and if a dragoon fall from his horse he rises up a musketeer) “can make such a show with their halfpence?” “Yonder lad,” answered another, “is surely some straw-squire whose mother hath sent him the milk-pence, and those he now spends upon his comrades, that some time they may pull him out of the mud or through a ditch.” With which words they aimed at me, for they took me for a young nobleman. Of such talk the maid that waited brought me private news: yet since I heard it not myself, I could do no more than fill a great beer-glass with wine and let it go round to the health of all good musketeers, and at every round made such a hubbub that none could hear himself speak. And this vexed them yet more, so that they said aloud, “What in the devil’s name have these prop-hoppers for an easy life of it!” Whereupon Jump-i’-th’-field answered, “And what matters that to the bootblacks?” This passed well enough; for he looked so big and held so fierce and threatening a carriage that no one cared to give him the rub. Yet he must again fall foul of them, and this time of a fellow of some consideration, who answered, “Ay, and if these loiterers could not so swagger here on their own dunghill (for he thought we lay there in garrison, because our clothes seemed not so weather-beaten as those of the poor musketeers who must lie day and night in open field), where could they show themselves? Who knows not that any of them in the battlefield is as surely the booty of the troopers as is the pigeon of the hawk?” But I answered him, “It is our business to take cities and fortresses, whereas ye troopers, if ye come but to the poorest rat’s-nest of a town, can there drive no dog out of his den. Why may we not then have your good leave to make merry in that which is more ours than yours?” The trooper answered, “Him who is master in the field the fortresses must follow after: and that we troopers are masters in the field is proved by this: that I for myself not only fear not three such babes as thee, musket and all, but could stick a couple such in my hatband, and then ask the third where there were more to be found. And if I now sat by thee,” said he with scorn, “I would bestow on my young squire a couple of buffets to prove the truth of this.”
“Yea,” said I, “and though I have as good a pair of pistols as thou, notwithstanding I am no trooper, but only a bastard between such and the musketeers, yet, look you, even a child hath heart enough to show himself alone in open field against such a bully on horseback as thou art, and against all thine armoury.”
“Aha; thou swaggerer,” said the fellow, “I hold thee for a rascal if thou make not good thy words forthwith as becomes an honourable nobleman.”
So I threw him my glove and, “See then,” said I, “if I get this not from thee in fair field with my musket only and on foot, so hast thou right and good leave to hold and to reproach me for such a one as thy presumption has even now named me.”
Then we paid the reckoning and the trooper made ready his carbine and pistols, and I my musket: and as he rode away with his comrades to the place agreed upon he told my comrade Jump-i’-th’-field he might order my grave. So he answered him he had better give it in charge to one of his own fellows that he might order such for him. Yet thereafter he rebuked me for my presumption, and said plainly he feared I should now play my last tune. But I did but laugh, for I had long since devised a plan how to encounter the best mounted of troopers, if ever such an one should attack me in the open field, though armed only with my musket and on foot. So when we came to the place where this beggar’s dance should be, I had my musket already loaded with two balls, and put in fresh priming and smeared the cover of the pan with tallow as careful musketeers be wont to do, to guard the touch-hole and powder in the pan from damp in rainy weather.
Before we engaged, our comrades on both sides agreed that we should fight in open field, and to that end that we should start, one from the East, the other from the West, in a fenced plot; and thereafter each should do his best against the other as a soldier would do in face of the enemy; and that no one should help either party before or during or after the fight, either to succour his comrade, or to avenge his death or hurt. So when they
