porch of _The Annunciation_. God have their souls in keeping! Ay, those
were the good times, when I was young!"

"'Tis very true indeed, that year you tell of, two hundred pilgrims
crushed each other to death and departed from this world to the other.
And next day was never a sign to be seen of aught untoward."

As he so spake, Florent Guillaume noted a pilgrim, a very fat man, who
was not hurrying to get him assoiled with the same hot haste as the
rest, but kept rolling his wide eyes to right and left with a look of
distress and fear. Florent Guillaume stepped up to him and louted low.

"Messire," he accosted him, "one may see at a glance you are a sensible
man and an experienced; you do not rush blindly to the _pardon_ like a
sheep to the slaughter. The rest of the folk go helter-skelter thither,
the nose of one under the tail of the other; but you follow a wiser
fashion. Grant me the boon to be your guide, and you will not repent
your bargain."

The pilgrim, who proved to be a gentleman of Limoges, answered in the
patois of his countryside, that he had no use for a scurvy beggarman and
could very well find his own way to _The Annunciation_ for to receive
pardon for his faults. And therewith he set his face resolutely to the
hill. But Florent Guillaume cast himself at his feet, and tearing at his
hair:

"Stop! stop! messire," he cried; "i' God's name and by all the Saints,
I warn you go no farther! 'T will be your death, and you are not the man
we could see perish without grief and dolour. A few steps more and you
are a dead man! They are suffocating up yonder. Already full six hundred
pilgrims have given up the ghost. And this is but a small beginning! Do
you not know, messire, that twenty-two years agone, in the year of grace
one thousand four hundred and seven, on the selfsame day and at the
selfsame hour, under yonder porch, nine thousand six hundred and
thirty-eight persons, without reckoning women and children, trampled
each other underfoot and perished miserably? An you met the same fate,
I should never smile again. To see you is to love you, messire; to know
you is to conceive a sudden and overmastering desire to serve you."

The Limousin gentleman had halted in no small surprise and turned
pale to hear such discourse and see the fellow tearing out his hair in
fistfuls. In his terror he was for turning back the way he had come. But
Florent Guillaume, on his knees in the mud, held him back by the skirt
o