Labourers stayed their reaping to listen to him; but there was nothing
for them. He sang of adventure. Girls leaned at cottage doorways to
watch him down the way. There was nothing for them either, for all he
sang of love.

"She who now hath my heart
is so in every part;" etc., etc.

The words came tripping as a learnt lesson; but he had never loved a
girl, and fancied he never would. Women? Petticoats! For him there was
more than one adventure in life. Rather, my lady's chamber was the
last place in which he would have looked for adventure.

On the second day of his journey--in a country barren and stony, yet
with a hint of the leafy wildernesses to come in the ridges spiked
with pines, the cropping of heather here and there, and the ever-
increasing solitude of his way--he was set upon by four foot-pads, who
thought to beat the life out of his body as easily as boys that of a
dog. He asked nothing better than that they should begin; and he asked
so civilly that they very soon did. The fancy of glorious youth
transformed them into knights-at-arms, and their ashen cudgels into
blades. The only pity was that the end came so soon.

His sword dug its first sod, and might have carved four cowards
instead of one; but he was no vampire, so thereafter laid about him
with the flat of the tool. The three survivors claimed quarter.
"Quarter, you rogues!" cried he. "Kindly lend me one of your staves
for the purpose." He gave them a drubbing as one horsed his brother in
turn, and dropped them, a chapfallen trio, beside their dead. "Now,"