, I trow his answer will be tart!"

"We shall but get our deserts," sighed the elder knight, who had never
seen a joke in his life, and was somewhat displeased at his companion's
untimely levity. "'Twill be nine of the clock," he added in an
undertone, "by the time we regain our hostelry. Full many a mile shall
we have plodded this day!"

"How many? How many?" cried the eager youth, ever athirst for knowledge.

The old man was silent.

"Tell me," he answered, after a moment's thought, "what time it was when
we stood together on yonder peak. Not exact to the minute!" he added
hastily, reading a protest in the young man's face. "An' thy guess be
within one poor half-hour of the mark, 'tis all I ask of thy mother's
son! Then will I tell thee, true to the last inch, how far we shall have
trudged betwixt three and nine of the clock."

A groan was the young man's only reply; while his convulsed features and
the deep wrinkles that chased each other across his manly brow, revealed
the abyss of arithmetical agony into which one chance question had
plunged him.

KNOT II.

ELIGIBLE APARTMENTS.

"Straight down the crooked lane,
And all round the square."

"Let's ask Balbus about it," said Hugh.

"All right," said Lambert.

"_He_ can guess it," said Hugh.

"Rather," said Lambert.

No more words were needed: the two brothers understood each other
perfectly.

[Illustration: "BALBUS WAS ASSISTING HIS MOTHER-IN-LAW TO CONVINCE THE
DRAGON."]

Balbus was waiting for them at the hotel: the journey down had tired
him, he said: so his two pupils had been the round of the place, in
search of lodgings, without the old tutor who had been their inseparable
companion from their childhood. They had named him after the hero of
their Latin exercise-book, which overflowed with anecdotes of that
versatile genius--anecdotes whose vagueness in detail was more than
compensated by their sensational brilliance. "Balbus has overcome all
his enemies" had been marked by their tutor, in the margin of the book,
"Successful Bravery." In this way he had tried to extract a moral from
every anecdote about Balbus--sometimes one of warning, as in "Balbus had
borrowed a healthy dragon," against which he had written "Rashness in
Speculation"--sometimes of encouragement, as in the words "Influence of
Sympathy in United Action," which stood opposite to the anecdote "Balbus
was assisting his mother-in-law to convince the dragon"--and som