The age of chivalry, which yielded such good material to the poet and
romancer, was no doubt essential to the growth of civilization, but it
must have been an unhappy period for legitimate business. How could
trade, commerce, or even the professions, arts, or sciences, flourish
while the entire population spread itself over the bleaching-boards, day
after day, to watch the process of "jousting," while the corn was "in
the grass," and everybody's notes went to protest?

Then came the days of knight-errantry, when parties in malleable-iron
clothing and shirts of mail--which were worn without change--rode up and
down the country seeking for maids in distress. A pretty maid in those
days who lived on the main road could put on her riding-habit, go to the
window up-stairs, shed a tear, wave her kerchief in the air, and in half
an hour have the front lawn full of knights-errant tramping over the
peony beds and castor-oil plants.

[Illustration: A PRETTY MAID IN THOSE DAYS.]

In this way a new rescuer from day to day during the "errant" season
might be expected. Scarcely would the fair maid reach her destination
and get her wraps hung up, when a rattle of gravel on the window would
attract her attention, and outside she would see, with swelling heart,
another knight-errant, who crooked his Russia-iron elbow and murmured,
"Miss, may I have the pleasure of this escape with you?"

"But I do not recognize you, sir," she would straightway make reply; and
well she might, for, with his steel-shod countenance and corrugated-iron
clothes, he was generally so thoroughly _incog._ that his crest, on a