w wept more and more broken-heartedly. And the big champion sat
looking at her, and his broad shoulders relaxed. He viciously kicked at
the heavy glistening green head of the dragon, still bleeding uglily
there at his feet, but that did no good whatever. The dragon-queller was
beaten. He could do nothing against such moisture, his resolution was
dampened and his independence was washed away by this salt flood. And
they say too that, now his youth was gone, Dom Manuel began to think of
quietness and of soft living more resignedly than he acknowledged.

"Very well, then," Manuel says, by and by, "let us cross the Loir, and
ride south to look for our infernal coronet with the rubies in it, and
for your servants, and for some of your palaces."

So in the Christmas holidays they bring a tall burly squinting
gray-haired warrior to King Ferdinand, in a lemon grove behind the royal
palace. Here the sainted King, duly equipped with his halo and his
goose-feather, was used to perform the lesser miracles on Wednesdays and
Saturdays.

The King was delighted by the change in Manuel's looks, and said that
experience and maturity were fine things to be suggested by the
appearance of a nobleman in Manuel's position. But, a pest! as for
giving him any troops with which to conquer Poictesme, that was quite
another matter. The King needed his own soldiers for his own ends, which
necessitated the immediate capture of Cordova. Meanwhile here were the
Prince de Gatinais and the Marquess di Paz, who also had come with this
insane request, the one for soldiers to help him against the
Philistines, and the other against the Catalans.

"Everybody to whom I ever granted a fief seems to need troops nowadays,"
the King grumbled, "and if any one of you had any judgment whatever you
would have retained your lands once they were given you."

"Our deficiencies, sire," says the young Prince de Gatinais, with
considerable spirit, "have not been altogether in judgment, but rather
in the support afforded us by our liege-lord."

This was perfectly true; but inasmuch as such blunt truths are not
usually flung at a king and a saint, now Ferdinand's thin brows went up.

"Do you think so?" said the King. "We must see about it. What is that,
for example?"

He pointed to the pool by which the lemon-trees were watered, and the
Prince glanced at the yellow object afloat in this pool. "Sire," said de
Gatinais, "it is a lemon which has fallen from one of the t