lift, which the knights toss off at a draught, as they sit and listen to
the minstrel's music.

_Barnstaple_. Bravo, Ansard, bravo. It appears to me that you do not
want assistance in this romance.

_Ansard_. No, when I do I have always a holy and compassionate friar,
who pulls a wonderful restorative or healing balm, out of his bosom.
The puffs of Solomon's Balm of Gilead are a fool to the real merits of
my pharmacopoeia contained in a small vial.

_Barnstaple_. And pray what may be the title of this book of yours, for
I have known it take more time to fix upon a title than to write the
three volumes.

_Ansard_. I call it _The Undiscovered Secret_, and very properly so
too, for it never is explained. But if you please, I will read you some
passages from it. I think you will approve of them. For instance, now
let us take this, in the second volume. You must know, that
Angelicanarinella (for that is the name of my heroine) is thrown into a
dungeon not more than four feet square, but more than six hundred feet
below the surface of the earth. The ways are so intricate, and the
subterranean so vast, and the dungeons so numerous, that the base
Ethiop, who has obeyed his master's orders in confining her, has himself
been lost in the labyrinth, and has not been able to discover what
dungeon he put her in. For three days he has been looking for it,
during which our heroine has been without food, and he is still
searching and scratching his woolly head in despair, as he is to die by
slow torture, if he does not reproduce her--for you observe, the chief
who has thrown her into his dungeon is most desperately in love with
her.

_Barnstaple_. That of course; and that is the way to prove romantic
love--you ill treat--but still she is certainly in a dilemma, as well as
the Ethiop.

_Ansard_. Granted; but she talks like the heroine of a romance.
Listen. (ANSARD _reads_.) "The beauteous and divinely moulded form of
the angelic Angelicanarinella pressed the dank and rotten straw which
had been thrown down by the scowling, thick-lipped Ethiop for her
repose--she, for whom attendant maidens had smoothed the Sybaritic sheet
of finest texture, under the elaborately carved and sumptuously gilt
canopy, the silken curtains, and the tassels of the purest dust of
gold."

_Barnstaple_. Tassels of dust of gold! only figuratively, I suppose.

_Ansard_. Nothing more. "Each particular straw of this dank, damp bed
was ela