employed to decipher it again, sheet by sheet. It will cost you money,
but I should say that it was worth while. Where the devil is, or was,
the land of Tavantinsuyu?"

"I know," I answered, glad to be able to show myself superior to my
learned friend in one humble instance. "Tavantinsuyu was the native name
for the Empire of Peru before the Spanish Invasion. But how did this
Hubert get there in the time of Richard II? That is some centuries
earlier than Pizarro set foot upon its shores."

"Go and find out," he answered. "It will amuse you for quite a long
while and perhaps the results may meet the expenses of decipherment, if
they are worth publishing. I expect they are not, but then, I have read
so many old manuscripts and found most of them so jolly dull."

Well, that business was accomplished at a cost that I do not like to
record, and here are the results, more or less modernised, since often
Hubert of Hastings expressed himself in a queer and archaic fashion.
Also sometimes he used Indian words as though he had talked the tongue
of these Peruvians, or rather the Chanca variety of it, so long that he
had begun to forget his own language. Myself I have found his story very
romantic and interesting, and I hope that some others will be of the
same opinion. Let them judge.

But oh, I do wonder what was the end of it, some of which doubtless was
recorded on the rotted sheets though of course there can have been no
account of the great battle in which he fell, since Quilla could not
write at all, least of all in English, though I suppose she survived it
and him.