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[Exeunt Mrs. Page and Anne.]

Quick. This is my doing now. “Nay,” said I, “will you cast away your child on a fool, and a physician? Look on Master Fenton.” This is my doing.

Fent.

I thank thee; and I pray thee, once to-night

Give my sweet Nan this ring. There’s for thy pains.

Quick. Now heaven send thee good fortune! [Exit Fenton.] A kind heart he hath. A woman would run through fire and water for such a kind heart. But yet I would my master had Mistress Anne; or I would Master Slender had her; or, in sooth, I would Master Fenton had her. I will do what I can for them all three, for so I have promis’d, and I’ll be as good as my word, but speciously for Master Fenton. Well, I must of another errand to Sir John Falstaff from my two mistresses. What a beast am I to slack it!

Exit.

¶

Enter Falstaff.

Fal. Bardolph, I say!

[Enter] Bardolph.

Bard. Here, sir.

Fal. Go fetch me a quart of sack, put a toast in’t. [Exit Bardolph.] Have I liv’d to be carried in a basket like a barrow of butcher’s offal? and to be thrown in the Thames? Well, [and] I be serv’d such another trick, I’ll have my brains ta’en out and butter’d, and give them to a dog for a new-year’s gift. The rogues slighted me into the river with as little remorse as they would have drown’d a blind bitch’s puppies, fifteen i’ th’ litter; and you may know by my size that I have a kind of alacrity in sinking; [and] the bottom were as deep as hell, I should down. I had been drown’d, but that the shore was shelvy and shallow—a death that I abhor; for the water swells a man; and what a thing should I have been when I had been swell’d! I should have been a mountain of mummy.