including the Bishop's attendant clergy, officers of the
household, and strangers below the rank of the very first nobility, were
already placed at their meal. A seat at the upper end of the board
had, however, been reserved beside the Bishop's domestic chaplain, who
welcomed the stranger with the old college jest of Sero venientibus ossa
[the bones for those who come late], while he took care so to load his
plate with dainties, as to take away all appearance of that tendency to
reality, which, in Quentin's country, is said to render a joke either
no joke, or at best an unpalatable one ["A sooth boord (true joke) is no
boord," says the Scot. S.].

In vindicating himself from the suspicion of ill breeding, Quentin
briefly described the tumult which had been occasioned in the city by
his being discovered to belong to the Scottish Archer Guard of Louis,
and endeavoured to give a ludicrous turn to the narrative by saying that
he had been with difficulty extricated by a fat burgher of Liege and his
pretty daughter.

But the company were too much interested in the story to taste the jest.
All operations of the table were suspended while Quentin told his tale,
and when he had ceased, there was a solemn pause, which was only broken
by the Majordomo's saying in a low and melancholy tone, "I would to God
that we saw those hundred lances of Burgundy!"

"Why should you think so deeply on it?" said Quentin. "You have many
soldiers here, whose trade is arms, and your antagonists are only the
rabble of a disorderly city, who will fly before the first flutter of a
banner with men at arms arrayed beneath it."

"You do not know the men of Liege," said the Chaplain, "of whom it may
be said, that, not even excepting those of Ghent, they are at once
the fiercest and the most untameable in Europe. Twice has the Duke of
Burgundy chastised them for their repeated revolts against their Bishop,
and twice hath he suppressed them with much severity, abridged their
privileges, taken away their banners, and established rights and claims
to himself which were not before competent over a free city of the
Empire.--Nay, the last time he defeated them with much slaughter near
Saint Tron, where Liege lost nearly six thousand men, what with the
sword, what with those drowned in the flight, and thereafter, to disable
them from farther mutiny, Duke Charles refused to enter at any of the
gates which they had surrendered, but, beating to the ground forty