that, after his skirmish with Orleans and Dunois, one
of his comrades had, at Lord Crawford's command, replaced the morion,
cloven by the sword of the latter, with one of the steel lined bonnets
which formed a part of the proper and well known equipment of the
Scottish Guards. That an individual of this body, which was always kept
very close to Louis's person, should have appeared in the streets of a
city whose civil discontents had been aggravated by the agents of that
King, was naturally enough interpreted by the burghers of Liege into a
determination on the part of Louis openly to assist their cause, and
the apparition of an individual archer was magnified into a pledge of
immediate and active support from Louis--nay, into an assurance that his
auxiliary forces were actually entering the town at one or other, though
no one could distinctly tell which, of the city gates.

To remove a conviction so generally adopted, Quentin easily saw was
impossible--nay, that any attempt to undeceive men so obstinately
prepossessed in their belief, would be attended with personal risk,
which, in this case, he saw little use of incurring. He therefore
hastily resolved to temporize, and to get free the best way he could,
and this resolution he formed while they were in the act of conducting
him to the Stadthouse [town house], where the notables of the town were
fast assembling, in order to hear the tidings which he was presumed to
have brought, and to regale him with a splendid banquet.

In spite of all his opposition, which was set down to modesty, he was on
every side surrounded by the donors of popularity, the unsavoury tide
of which now floated around him. His two burgomaster friends, who were
Schoppen, or Syndics of the city, had made fast both his arms. Before
him, Nikkel Blok, the chief of the butchers' incorporation, hastily
summoned from his office in the shambles, brandished his death doing
axe, yet smeared with blood and brains, with a courage and grace which
brantwein [spirits] alone could inspire. Behind him came the tall, lean,
rawboned, very drunk, and very patriotic figure of Claus Hammerlein,
president of the mystery of the workers in iron, and followed by at
least a thousand unwashed artificers of his class. Weavers, nailers,
ropemakers, artisans of every degree and calling, thronged forward to
join the procession from every gloomy and narrow street. Escape seemed a
desperate and impossible adventure.

In this dilem