large Xenodochium to receive the victims of flood or fire. Giles and all
his friends were kind, but all was not enough; when lo! the Dominican
monks of Gouda to whom his parlour and heart had been open for years,
came out nobly, and put down a handsome sum to aid the charitable vicar.

"The dear good souls," said Margaret; "who would have thought it?"

"Any one who knows them," said Gerard, "Who more charitable than monks?"

"Go to! They do but give the laity back a pig of their own sow."

"And what more do I? What more doth the duke?"

Then the ambitious vicar must build almshouses for decayed true men in
their old age close to the manse, that he might keep and feed them, as
well as lodge them. And his money being gone, he asked Margaret for a
few thousand bricks and just took off his coat and turned builder; and
as he had a good head, and the strength of a Hercules, with the zeal of
an artist, up rose a couple of almshouses parson built.

And at this work Margaret would sometimes bring him his dinner, and
add a good bottle of Rhenish. And once seeing him run up a plank with a
wheelbarrow full of bricks which really most bricklayers would have
gone staggering under, she said, "Times are changed since I had to carry
little Gerard for thee."

"Ay, dear one, thanks to thee."

When the first home was finished, the question was who they should put
into it; and being fastidious over it like a new toy, there was much
hesitation. But an old friend arrived in time to settle this question.

As Gerard was passing a public-house in Rotterdam one day, he heard a
well-known voice, He looked up, and there was Denys of Burgundy, but
sadly changed; his beard stained with grey, and his clothes worn and
ragged; he had a cuirass still, and gauntlets, but a staff instead of an
arbalest, To the company he appeared to be bragging and boasting, but in
reality he was giving a true relation of Edward the Fourth's invasion of
an armed kingdom with 2000 men, and his march through the country with
armies capable of swallowing him looking on, his battles at Tewkesbury
and Barnet, and reoccupation of his capital and kingdom in three months
after landing at the Humber with a mixed handful of Dutch, English, and
Burgundians.

In this, the greatest feat of arms the century had seen, Denys had
shone; and whilst sneering at the warlike pretensions of Charles the
Bold, a duke with an itch but no talent for fighting, and proclaiming
the English