cause it
must stand in this narrative as the representative of many such days
which now succeeded to it. For our travellers on their weary way
experienced that which most of my readers will find in the longer
journey of life, viz., that stirring events are not evenly distributed
over the whole road, but come by fits and starts, and as it were, in
clusters. To some extent this may be because they draw one another by
links more or less subtle. But there is more in it than that. It happens
so. Life is an intermittent fever. Now all narrators, whether of history
or fiction, are compelled to slur these barren portions of time or else
line trunks. The practice, however, tends to give the unguarded reader
a wrong arithmetical impression, which there is a particular reason
for avoiding in these pages as far as possible. I invite therefore your
intelligence to my aid, and ask you to try and realize that, although
there were no more vivid adventures for a long while, one day's march
succeeded another; one monastery after another fed and lodged them
gratis with a welcome always charitable, sometimes genial; and though
they met no enemy but winter and rough weather, antagonists not always
contemptible, yet they trudged over a much larger tract of territory
than that, their passage through which I have described so minutely. And
so the pair, Gerard bronzed in the face and travel-stained from head to
foot, and Denys with his shoes in tatters, stiff and footsore both of
them, drew near the Burgundian frontier.

CHAPTER XXXI

Gerard was almost as eager for this promised land as Denys; for the
latter constantly chanted its praises, and at every little annoyance
showed him "they did things better in Burgundy;" and above all played on
his foible by guaranteeing clean bedclothes at the inns of that polished
nation. "I ask no more," the Hollander would say; "to think that I have
not lain once in a naked bed since I left home! When I look at their
linen, instead of doffing habit and hose, it is mine eyes and nose I
would fain be shut of."

Denys carried his love of country so far as to walk twenty leagues in
shoes that had exploded, rather than buy of a German churl, who would
throw all manner of obstacles in a customer's way, his incivility, his
dinner, his body.

Towards sunset they found themselves at equal distances from a little
town and a monastery, only the latter was off the road. Denys was for
the inn, Gerard for the conven