They seemed incapable of deceit, but I do not say
they really were so. My own transactions were confined to the
purchase of some golden-gage plums, and I advise the reader
rather to buy greengages; the other plums practised the deception
in their looks which their venders abhorred.
VIII
I wandered in a perfectly contemporary mood through the long
ranks and lanes of the marketplace, and did not know till
afterward that at one end of it, called the Pavement, the public
executions used to take place for those great or small occasions
which brought folks to the block or scaffold in the past. I had
later some ado to verify the dismal fact from a cluster of people
before a tavern who seemed to be taking bets for the Doncaster
Week, and I could hardly keep them from booking me for this horse
or that when I merely wanted to know whether it was on a certain
spot the Earl of Northumberland had his head cut off for leading
a rising against Henry IV.; or some such execution.
What riches of story has not York to browbeat withal the
storyless New-Yorker who visits her! That Henry IV.
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