[1] The reference is evidently to the secret treaty by which King Charles of England received annual payment for compliance with King Louis's schemes for French aggression.
Sign-boards creaked and swung to every puff of wind. Great hackney-coaches, sunk at the waist like those old gallipot boats of ours, went ploughing past through the mud of mid-road, with bepowdered footmen clinging behind and saucy coachmen perched in front. These flunkeys thought it fine sport to splash us passers-by, or beguiled the time when there was stoppage across the narrow street by lashing rival drivers with their long whips and knocking cock-hats to the gutter. 'Prentices stood ringing their bells and shouting their wares at every shop-door. "What d'ye lack? What d'ye lack? What d'ye please to lack, good sirs? Walk this way for kerseys, sayes, and perpetuanoes! Bands and ruffs and piccadillies! Walk this way! Walk this way!"
"Pardieu, lad!" says M. Radisson, elbowing a saucy spark from the wall for the tenth time in as many paces. "Pardieu, you can't hear yourself think! Shut up to you!" he called to a bawling 'prentice dressed in white velvet waistcoat like a showman's dummy to exhibit the fashion. "Shut up to you!"
And I heard the fellow telling his comrades my strange companion with the tangled hair was a pirate from the Barbary States. Another saucy vender caught at the chance.
"Perukes! Perukes! Newest French periwigs!" he shouts, jangling his bell and putting himself across M. Radisson's course. "You'd please to lack a periwig, sir! Walk this way! Walk this way--"
"Out of my way!" orders Radisson with a hiss of his rapier round the fellow's fat calves. "'Tis a milliner's doll the town makes of a man! Out of my way!"
And the 'prentice went skipping. We were to meet the directors of the Hudson's Bay Company that night, and we had come out to refurbish our scant, wild attire. But bare had we turned the corner for the linen-draper's shops of Fleet Street when M. Radisson's troubles began. Idlers eyed us with strange looks. Hucksters read our necessitous state and ran at heel shouting their wares. Shopmen saw needy customers in us and sent their 'prentices running. Chairmen splashed us as they passed; and impudent dandies powdered and patched and laced and bewigged like any fizgig of a girl would have elbowed us from the wall to the gutter for the sport of seeing M. Radisson's moccasins slimed.