e barber
called after her, and told her to add the wine to his score. This won
him ejaculations of approval, which pleased him very much and made his
little rat-eyes shine; and such applause is right and proper, for when
we do a liberal and gallant thing it is but natural that we should wish
to see notice taken of it.

The barber called upon the people to rise and drink the Paladin's
health, and they did it with alacrity and affectionate heartiness,
clashing their metal flagons together with a simultaneous crash, and
heightening the effect with a resounding cheer. It was a fine thing to
see how that young swashbuckler had made himself so popular in a strange
land in so little a while, and without other helps to his advancement
than just his tongue and the talent to use it given him by God--a talent
which was but one talent in the beginning, but was now become ten
through husbandry and the increment and usufruct that do naturally
follow that and reward it as by a law.

The people sat down and began to hammer on the tables with their flagons
and call for "the King's Audience!--the King's Audience!--the King's
Audience!" The Paladin stood there in one of his best attitudes, with
his plumed great hat tipped over to the left, the folds of his short
cloak drooping from his shoulder, and the one hand resting upon the hilt
of his rapier and the other lifting his beaker. As the noise died down
he made a stately sort of a bow, which he had picked up somewhere, then
fetched his beaker with a sweep to his lips and tilted his head back and
drained it to the bottom. The barber jumped for it and set it upon the
Paladin's table. Then the Paladin began to walk up and down his platform
with a great deal of dignity and quite at his ease; and as he walked he
talked, and every little while stopped and stood facing his house and so
standing continued his talk.

We went three nights in succession. It was plain that there was a
charm about the performance that was apart from the mere interest which
attaches to lying. It was presently discoverable that this charm lay in
the Paladin's sincerity. He was not lying consciously; he believed what
he was saying. To him, his initial statements were facts, and whenever
he enlarged a statement, the enlargement became a fact too. He put his
heart into his extravagant narrative, just as a poet puts his heart into
a heroic fiction, and his earnestness disarmed criticism--disarmed it as
far as he himself