y compress, temporary prisoners with their spoils
in their pockets, and cheap jewelry shining enticingly all about them,
they were obliged for the time to comport themselves like honest
citizens. But, although their bodies were in durance vile, their eyes
could roam covetously to a showy trinket on the broad bosom of some
buxom good-wife, or a gewgaw that hung from the neck of a red-cheeked
lass.

"Ha!" muttered the scamp-student to his good spouse, "here are all the
jolly boys immersed to their necks, like prisoners buried in the sand
by the Arabs."

"Hush!" she whispered, warningly. "See you yonder--the duke's fool; he
wears the arms of Charles, the emperor."

"And there's the Duke of Friedwald himself," answered the ragged
scholar. "Look! the jesters are going to fight. They have arranged
them in two parties. Half of them go with the duke and his knights;
the other half with his Lordship's opponents."

"But the duke's fool, by chance, is set against his master," she
mumbled, significantly.

"Call you it chance?" he said in a low voice, and Nanette nudged him
angrily in the side with her elbow, so that he cried out, and attention
would have been called to them but for a ripple of laughter which
started on the edge of the crowd and was taken up by the serried ranks.

"Ho! ho! Look at Triboulet!" shouted the delighted populace. "Ah, the
droll fellow!"

All eyes were now bent to the arena, where, on a powerful nag, sat
perched the misshapen jester. With whip and spur he was vehemently
plying a horse that stubbornly stood as motionless as carven stone.
Thinking at the last moment of a plan for escape from the dangerous
features of the tourney, the hunchback had bribed one of the attendants
to fetch him a steed which for sullen obduracy surpassed any charger in
the king's stables. Fate, he was called, because nothing could move or
change him, and now, with head pushed forward and ears thrust back, he
proved himself beneath the blows and spurring of the seemingly excited
rider, worthy of this appellation.

"Go on, Fate; go on!" exclaimed the apparently angry dwarf. "Will you
be balky now, when Triboulet has glory within his grasp? Miserable
beast! unhappy fate! When bright eyes are watching the great
Triboulet!"

If not destined to score success with his lance, the dwarf at least had
won a victory through his comical situation and ready wit. Fair ladies
forgot his ugliness; the pages his ill-humor;