ad now its complement in the fair
new court of Francis Clerke. The enlargement of his mother-college
was not so marvellous to him, however, as the enlargement of one
among her sons. A fellow-commoner of his time had, like himself, come
again to Cambridge, arriving thither by a different road. This
fellow-commoner was now the member in Parliament for Cambridge, had
buckled a soldier's baldric over a farmer's coat, had carried things
with a high hand in the ancient collegiate city, had made himself
greatly liked by these, greatly disliked by those.

Musing philosophically, but also observing shrewdly and inquiring as
pertinaciously as dexterously, our traveller made himself familiar
with places of public resort, sat in taverns where he tasted ale more
soberly than was his use or his pleasure, listened, patently devout,
to godly exhortations, and implicated himself by an interested
silence in strenuous political opinions. From all this he learned
much that amazed, much that amused him, but what interested him most
of all had to do with the third stage of his retrospective
pilgrimage. If he had not been bound for Harby eventually, what came
to his ears by chance would have spurred him thither, ever keen as he
was to behold the vivid, the theatrical in life. Women had always
delighted him, if they had often damned him, and there was a woman's
name on rumor's many tongues when rumor talked of Harby. So it came
to be that he rode sooner than he had proposed, and far harder than
he had proposed, through green, level Cambridgeshire, through green,
hilly Oxfordshire, with Harby for his goal. Chameleon-like, he
changed hues on the way, shifting, with the help of his wallet, back
into a gaudier garb less likely to be frowned on in regions kindly to
the King.

I

THE STRANGER AT THE GATES

The village of Harby was vastly proud of its inn, and by consequence
the innkeeper thought highly of the village of Harby. He had been a
happy innkeeper for the better part of a reasonably long life, and he
had hoped to be a happy innkeeper to that life's desirably distant
close. But the world is not made for innkeepers by innkeepers, and
Master Vallance was newly come into woes. For it had pleased certain
persons of importance lately to come to loggerheads without any
consideration for the welfare of Master Vallance, and in trying to
peer through the dust of their broils on the possible future for
England and himself, he could progn