ness
nor prithee thine; since by the laws of the tournament a knight may ride
masked for a specified time or until a particular purpose is achieved,
that purpose being, I wot, victory for himself and for me a handful of
byzants from thee."

"Now, go ahead, Budd," called the Mayor again. "Are you going crazy?"

The Hon. Sam stretched out his arms once to loosen them for gesture,
thrust his chest out, and uplifted his chin: "Fair ladies, nobles of the
realm, and good knights," he said sonorously, and he raised one hand to
his mouth and behind it spoke aside to me:

"How's my voice--how's my voice?"

"Great!" His question was genuine, for the mask of humor had dropped and
the man was transformed. I knew his inner seriousness, his oratorical
command of good English, and I knew the habit, not uncommon among
stump-speakers in the South, of falling, through humor, carelessness, or
for the effect of flattering comradeship, into all the lingual sins of
rural speech; but I was hardly prepared for the soaring flight the Hon.
Sam took now. He started with one finger pointed heavenward:

"The knights are dust
And their good swords are rast;
Their souls are with the saints, we trust."

"Scepticism is but a harmless phantom in these mighty hills. We BELIEVE
that with the saints is the GOOD knight's soul, and if, in the radiant
unknown, the eyes of those who have gone before can pierce the little
shadow that lies between, we know that the good knights of old look
gladly down on these good knights of to-day. For it is good to be
remembered. The tireless struggle for name and fame since the sunrise
of history attests it; and the ancestry worship in the East and the
world-wide hope of immortality show the fierce hunger in the human soul
that the memory of it not only shall not perish from this earth, but
that, across the Great Divide, it shall live on--neither forgetting nor
forgotten. You are here in memory of those good knights to prove that
the age of chivalry is not gone; that though their good swords are rust,
the stainless soul of them still illumines every harmless spear point
before me and makes it a torch that shall reveal, in your own hearts
still aflame, their courage, their chivalry, their sense of protection
for the weak, and the honor in which they held pure women, brave men,
and almighty God.

"The tournament, some say, goes back to the walls of Troy. The form of
it passed with the windmills that Don Qui