er your knife." (I shrewdly suspect this of formula.)

They fell to. The mistress drew her chair a little toward the table; and
provided company as well as meat; gossiped genially with them like old
acquaintances: but this form gone through, the busy dame was soon off
and sent in her daughter, a beautiful young woman of about twenty,
who took the vacant seat. She was not quite so broad and genial as the
elder, but gentle and cheerful, and showed a womanly tenderness for
Gerard on learning the distance the poor boy had come, and had to go.
She stayed nearly half-an-hour, and when she left them Gerard said,
"This an inn? Why, it is like home."

"Qui fit Francois il fit courtois," said Denys, bursting with gratified
pride.

"Courteous? nay, Christian; to welcome us like home guests and old
friends, us vagrants, here to-day and gone to-morrow. But indeed who
better merits pity and kindness than the worn traveller far from his
folk? Hola! here's another."

The new-comer was the chambermaid, a woman of about twenty-five, with
a cocked nose, a large laughing mouth, and a sparkling black eye, and a
bare arm very stout but not very shapely.

The moment she came in, one of the travellers passed a somewhat free
jest on her; the next the whole company were roaring at his expense,
so swiftly had her practised tongue done his business. Even as, in
a passage of arms between a novice and a master of fence, foils
clash--novice pinked. On this another, and then another, must break a
lance with her; but Marion stuck her great arms upon her haunches, and
held the whole room in play. This country girl possessed in perfection
that rude and ready humour which looks mean and vulgar on paper, but
carries all before it spoken: not wit's rapier; its bludgeon. Nature had
done much for her in this way, and daily practice in an inn the rest.

Yet shall she not be photographed by me, but feebly indicated: for it
was just four hundred years ago, the raillery was coarse, she returned
every stroke in kind, and though a virtuous woman, said things without
winking, which no decent man of our day would say even among men.

Gerard sat gaping with astonishment. This was to him almost a new
variety of "that interesting species," homo. He whispered "Denys, Now
I see why you Frenchmen say 'a woman's tongue is her sword:'" just then
she levelled another assailant; and the chivalrous Denys, to console
and support "the weaker vessel," the iron kettle among