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SUMMARY
{The first part - alone, Falstaff complains about his recent
experience of being tossed in the river with the laundry.
The second part - a little later, in the same scene, Falstaff
tells Ford - (the husband of Mistress Ford who Falstaff wishes
to seduce and is now disguised as the fictitious Master Brook) -
of his wet misadventure.}
Have I lived to be
carried in a basket, and to be thrown in the
Thames like a barrow of butcher's offal? Well,
if I be served such another trick, I'll have my
brains ta'en out, and buttered, 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 drowned a blind bitch's puppies,
fifteen i' the litter; and you may know by my
size that I have a kind of alacrity in sinking: if
the bottom were as deep as hell, I should down.
I had been drowned 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 swelled! I should
have been a mountain of mummy.
Ford: And how long you there?
Nay, you shall hear, Master Brook, what
I have suffered to bring this woman to evil for
your good. Being thus crammed in the basket,
a couple of Ford's knaves, his hinds, were called
forth by their mistress to carry me in the name
of foul clothes to Datchet-lane: they took me
on their shoulders; met the jealous knave their
master in the door, who asked them once or
twice what they had in their basket. I quaked
for fear lest the lunatic knave would have
searched it; but Fate, ordaining he should be a
cuckold, held his hand. Well; on went he for a
search, and away went I for foul clothes. But
mark the sequel, Master Brook: I suffered the
pangs of three several deaths: first, an intoler-
able fright, to be detected with a jealous rotten
bell-wether; next, to be compassed, like a good
bilbo, in the circumference of a peck, hilt to
point, heel to head; and then, to be stopped in,
like a strong distillation, with stinking clothes
that fretted in their own grease: think of that,
a man of my kidney, think of that, that am as
subject to heat as butter; a man of continual
dissolution and thaw: it was a miracle to 'scape
suffocation. And in the height of this bath,
when I was more than half stewed in grease,
like a Dutch dish, to be thrown into the Thames,
and cooled, glowing hot, in that surge, like a
horse-shoe; think of that, hissing hot, think of
that, Master Brook!