The Palmer received the boon with another low reverence, and followed
Edwina out of the apartment.

In the anteroom he found his attendant Anwold, who, taking the torch
from the hand of the waiting-maid, conducted him with more haste than
ceremony to an exterior and ignoble part of the building, where a number
of small apartments, or rather cells, served for sleeping places to the
lower order of domestics, and to strangers of mean degree.

"In which of these sleeps the Jew?" said the Pilgrim.

"The unbelieving dog," answered Anwold, "kennels in the cell next your
holiness.--St Dunstan, how it must be scraped and cleansed ere it be
again fit for a Christian!"

"And where sleeps Gurth the swineherd?" said the stranger.

"Gurth," replied the bondsman, "sleeps in the cell on your right, as the
Jew on that to your left; you serve to keep the child of circumcision
separate from the abomination of his tribe. You might have occupied a
more honourable place had you accepted of Oswald's invitation."

"It is as well as it is," said the Palmer; "the company, even of a Jew,
can hardly spread contamination through an oaken partition."

So saying, he entered the cabin allotted to him, and taking the torch
from the domestic's hand, thanked him, and wished him good-night. Having
shut the door of his cell, he placed the torch in a candlestick made of
wood, and looked around his sleeping apartment, the furniture of which
was of the most simple kind. It consisted of a rude wooden stool,
and still ruder hutch or bed-frame, stuffed with clean straw, and
accommodated with two or three sheepskins by way of bed-clothes.

The Palmer, having extinguished his torch, threw himself, without taking
off any part of his clothes, on this rude couch, and slept, or at least
retained his recumbent posture, till the earliest sunbeams found their
way through the little grated window, which served at once to admit both
air and light to his uncomfortable cell. He then started up, and after
repeating his matins, and adjusting his dress, he left it, and entered
that of Isaac the Jew, lifting the latch as gently as he could.

The inmate was lying in troubled slumber upon a couch similar to that on
which the Palmer himself had passed the night. Such parts of his dress
as the Jew had laid aside on the preceding evening, were disposed
carefully around his person, as if to prevent the hazard of their
being carried off during his slumbers. There was a trouble