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am paying you per musket, Richard. That means as many or as few as ye care to make.” He shrugged, an alien gesture. “Yes, I would like fifteen or twenty in a day, but I am prepared to take one. It is your choice.”
    “Ten in a day, sir?”
    “Ten is perfectly satisfactory.”
    So Richard walked home to the Cooper’s Arms in mid afternoon, his ten muskets completed and successfully tested. Senhor Habitas was pleased; he would see enough of William Henry and Peg as well as bank enough to make that house on Clifton Hill a reality. His son was walking; soon the allurements of Broad Street would beckon through the open tavern door and William Henry would go adventuring. Better by far that his footsteps led him along paths perfumed with flowers than paths redolent with the stench of the Froom at low tide.
    But it was neither Peg nor William Henry who reached him first when he walked in; Mr. James Thistlethwaite leaped up from “his” table to envelop Richard in a massive hug.
    “Let me go, Jem! Those pistols will go off!”
    “Richard, Richard! I thought I’d not see ye again!”
    “Not see me again? Why? Had I worked from dawn to dusk—and as you see, I am not—you would still have seen me in winter,” said Richard, detaching himself and holding out his arms to William Henry, who toddled into them. Then Peg came, smiling an apology with her eyes, to kiss him full upon the lips. Thus when Richard sat down at Jem Thistlethwaite’s table he felt as if his world had glued itself back together again; the chasm was not there.
    When Dick handed him a tankard of beer he sipped at it, liking the slightly bitter taste but not desperate for it. The son of a temperate victualler, he too was temperate, drank only beer and then never enough to feel it. Which, had he realized, was why—apart from natural affection—Senhor Tomas Habitas prized him so. The work called for steady, skillful hands properly connected to a fresh, sharp mind, and it was rare to light upon a man who did not drink too much. Almost everybody drank too much. Mostly rum or gin. Threepence bought a half-pint of rum or, depending upon its quality, as much as a full pint of gin. Nor were there any laws on the books to punish excessive drinking, though there were laws to punish almost everything else. The Government made too much money from excise taxes to want to discourage drinking.
    In Bristol more rum was made and consumed than gin; gin was what the poorest folk drank. Chief importer of sugar to the whole British Isles, Bristol quite naturally made itself the capital of Rum. As to strength, there was little difference between the two spirits, though rum was richer, lasted longer in the system and was more bearable the morning after.
    Mr. Thistlethwaite drank rum of the best kind, and had settled upon the Cooper’s Arms as his home-away-from-home because Dick Morgan bought from the rum house of Mr. Thomas Cave in Redcliff; Cave’s rum was peerless.
    So by the time that Richard walked in, Mr. Thistlethwaite was well away, more so than usual by three o’clock. He had missed Richard, as simple as that, and had assumed that from now on Richard would never be there before five and it came time for him to leave. That five was his inflexible rule represented a last instinct for self-preservation; he knew that were he to stay for one minute more, he would end lying permanently in the gutter which ran down the middle of Broad Street.
    Delighted that Richard was still going to be a part of each tavern day, he righted himself unsteadily and prepared to take his leave. “Early, I know, but the sight of you, Richard, has quite overcome me,” he announced, weaving his way to the door. “Though I do not know why,” came the sound of his voice from Broad Street. “I really do not know why, for who are ye, save the son of my tavern-keeper? It is a mystery, a mystery.” His head, battered tricorn at a rakish angle, appeared around the jamb. “Is it possible that