r like a gibbous moon and a wry leg
like a stricken tree, and his face was as the face of a goblin, with a
long, peaked nose, and loose, protruding lips, traitors to the few and
evil teeth that interwalled his livid gums, and his ears stood out like
bats' wings from his yellow, wrinkled cheeks. He was visibly punished by
his journey; the sweat streamed from his leather and under his puckered
eyelids his eyes flamed imprecations. His grotesque body was enveloped
in yet more grotesque apparel--the piebald of the buffoon, the mottled
livery of the chartered mountebank. There was a slender collar of gold
about his neck, on which those that were near enough to him and had
quick sight might read in plain terms that he was a royal fool, one of
those jesters whom the great loved to tend to their beck, that they
might ply them with mirth in hours that were mirthless. When the
fantastical fellow had reached the summit he flung himself at once onto
the nearest seat that one of the fallen columns afforded, and sat for a
space gasping and puffing and spitting out blasphemies between every
gasp and puff of his staggered anatomy.

When his wind came to him it took shape in a furious soliloquy,
addressed to the vacant space about. "Devil take the day!" he grunted,
pressing his hands to his lean sides as if he were trying to squeeze
back the breath into his jaded body. "The sun rides as sky-high as the
King's pride, and the air blazes as dog-hot as the King's choler. I have
climbed the hill-side to spite him, and now am like to die of thirst to
spite myself, unless I can find friends and flagons."

So he chattered to himself as if he were conversing with some familiar
spirit or demon, and as he babbled his dull eyes stared around him
stupidly, taking slow stock of unfamiliar objects. He grinned
spitefully at the church and its great archangel and mouthed a lewd
objurgation. Turning his back on the church, he leered at the pillars
and the mosque contemptuously until it dimly dawned upon him that the
ruin was now a place of human habitation. He rose with a groan of
fatigue and hobbled towards it. "A church is no good," he muttered, "but
hospitality may hide in that hovel. Knock and know." And having by this
time arrived at the door of the dwelling, he proceeded to rain a
succession of blows on it with his clinched fists, as if he were
determined not to be denied, and, at worst, to force an entrance.

The fury of his call was soon answer