bove all, to his faithful wife, ELEANOR, who devotedly nursed
him, and is said by some to have sucked the poison from the wound with
her own red lips (which I am very willing to believe), Edward soon
recovered and was sound again.

As the King his father had sent entreaties to him to return home, he now
began the journey. He had got as far as Italy, when he met messengers
who brought him intelligence of the King's death. Hearing that all was
quiet at home, he made no haste to return to his own dominions, but paid
a visit to the Pope, and went in state through various Italian Towns,
where he was welcomed with acclamations as a mighty champion of the Cross
from the Holy Land, and where he received presents of purple mantles and
prancing horses, and went along in great triumph. The shouting people
little knew that he was the last English monarch who would ever embark in
a crusade, or that within twenty years every conquest which the
Christians had made in the Holy Land at the cost of so much blood, would
be won back by the Turks. But all this came to pass.

There was, and there is, an old town standing in a plain in France,
called Chalons. When the King was coming towards this place on his way
to England, a wily French Lord, called the Count of Chalons, sent him a
polite challenge to come with his knights and hold a fair tournament with
the Count and _his_ knights, and make a day of it with sword and lance.
It was represented to the King that the Count of Chalons was not to be
trusted, and that, instead of a holiday fight for mere show and in good
humour, he secretly meant a real battle, in which the English should be
defeated by superior force.

The King, however, nothing afraid, went to the appointed place on the
appointed day with a thousand followers. When the Count came with two
thousand and attacked the English in earnest, the English rushed at them
with such valour that the Count's men and the Count's horses soon began
to be tumbled down all over the field. The Count himself seized the King
round the neck, but the King tumbled _him_ out of his saddle in return
for the compliment, and, jumping from his own horse, and standing over
him, beat away at his iron armour like a blacksmith hammering on his
anvil. Even when the Count owned himself defeated and offered his sword,
the King would not do him the honour to take it, but made him yield it up
to a common soldier. There had been such fury shown in this fight