alue in gold. To do them the more honor, he put
the bracelets on his wrists and the purse in his sleeve, and assured
them that, as long as they lasted, he would wear them for love of the
givers.

Then, mounting, the good knight rode away, leaving more tears of joy and
heartfelt gratitude behind him than can be said of few soldiers since
the world began. It was not for fame he had wrought, or of fame he had
thought, but he won high fame by his generous behavior, for his
treatment of his Brescian hosts is still quoted as the rarest deed in
his chaplet of good actions.

The two archers who had stayed with Bayard failed not to receive the
promised reward. Gaston de Foix, the Duke of Nemours, sent the knight a
number of presents, among them five hundred crowns, and these he divided
between the archers whom he had debarred from their share of the spoil.

It will suffice to say, in conclusion, that he reached the army in time
to take part in the battle that followed, and to add therein to his fame
as a "good knight without fear."

_EPISODES IN THE LIFE OF A TRAITOR._

At the early hour of one o'clock in the morning of September 8, 1523, a
train of men-at-arms and servants, headed by a tall, stern-faced,
soldierly-looking man, rode from the gates of the strong castle of
Chantelle, and headed southward in the direction of Spain. The leader
was dressed in armor, and carried sword by side and battle-axe at his
saddle-bow. Of his followers, some fifteen of them were attired in a
peculiar manner, wearing thick jackets of woollen cloth that seemed as
stiff as iron mail, and jingled metallically as they rode. Mail they
were, capable of turning arrow or spear thrust, but mail of gold, not of
iron, for in those jackets were sewed up thirty thousand crowns of gold,
and their wearers served as the ambulatory treasury of the proud soldier
at their head.

This man was no less a personage than Charles, Duke of Bourbon,
Constable of France, the highest personage in the kingdom next to the
monarch himself, but now in flight from that monarch, and from the
soldiers who were marching to environ Chantelle and carry him as a
prisoner to the king. There had been bad blood between Bourbon and
Francis I., pride and haughtiness on the one side, injustice and
indecision on the other; wrong to the subject, defiance to the king;
and now the "short-tempered" noble and great soldier had made a
moonlight flitting, bent on cutting loose from h