ards the statue, hoping to thrust the lance-point through the
ring, as by-and-by they would have to do at the sports at a royal
wedding or a coronation. But the moment the ring was touched a huge wet
sponge would swing round from the back of the figure and hit the
champion a sharp blow on the back of the head, to the great delight and
surprise of his companions.

It was not a game that could be played twice on the same person, as
Palissy well knew; but in those days great lords with trains of
attendants frequently stopped at each other's houses on the way to their
own lands, so that a constant supply of fresh pages might be looked for,
all eager to play at tilting at the ring.

* * * * *

It was in 1565 that Palissy was sent for to Paris by the queen, to help
her to decorate and lay out the gardens of the palace of the Tuileries,
which she was now planning, close to the Louvre.

The very name of the place must have sounded home-like in the ears of
Palissy, for Tuileries means nothing more than 'tile-fields,' and for a
long while this part of Paris had been the workshop of brick-makers and
potters outside the walls of the old city. But in the reign of
Catherine's father-in-law, Francis I., they were forced to move
further away, as the king had taken a fancy to the site, and had bought
it for his mother. Gardens were made where the furnaces had stood; but
these were by no means fine enough to please Catherine, and she called
in her favourite architect, Philibert Delorme, to erect a palace in
their place, and bade Palissy, now called 'Bernard of the Tuileries' by
his friends, to invent her a new pleasure-ground stretching away to the
west.

We may be sure that Palissy did not lose this happy chance of carrying
into practice the 'delectable garden' of his dreams. He had his
workshops and kilns on the spot, and a band of skilled potters who baked
the figures of men and animals which he himself fashioned out of clay.
Two of his sons, Nicholas and Mathurin, seem to have inherited some of
his talent, and were his partners, as we learn from a royal account book
of the year 1570, and it must have been pleasant to him to have their
company. The queen herself often walked down from the Louvre close by to
see how he was getting on, and to give her opinion as to the grouping of
some statues or the arrangement of a grotto; and here too came his
friends when in Paris, Montmorency, Conde, Jarnac and o