wallow a mouthful. Then came a kind of gruel,
and when the repast had lasted an hour and more, some hashed meat highly
peppered and the French and Dutch being now full to the brim with the
above dainties, and the draughts of beer the salt and spiced meats had
provoked, in came roasted kids, most excellent, and carp and trout fresh
from the stream. Gerard made an effort and looked angrily at them, but
"could no more," as the poets say. The Burgundian swore by the liver and
pike-staff of the good centurion, the natives had outwitted him. Then
turning to Gerard, he said, "Courage, l'ami, le diable est mort," as
loudly as before, but not with the same tone of conviction. The canny
natives had kept an internal corner for contingencies, and polished the
kid's very bones.

The feast ended with a dish of raw animalcula in a wicker cage. A cheese
had been surrounded with little twigs and strings; then a hole made
in it and a little sour wine poured in. This speedily bred a small but
numerous vermin. When the cheese was so rotten with them that only
the twigs and string kept it from tumbling to pieces and walking off
quadrivious, it came to table. By a malicious caprice of fate, cage
and menagerie were put down right under the Dutchman's organ of
self-torture. He recoiled with a loud ejaculation, and hung to the bench
by the calves of his legs.

"What is the matter?" said a traveller disdainfully. "Does the good
cheese scare ye? Then put it hither, in the name of all the saints!"

"Cheese!" cried Gerard, "I see none. These nauseous reptiles have made
away with every bit of it."

"Well," replied another, "it is not gone far. By eating of the mites we
eat the cheese to boot."

"Nay, not so," said Gerard. "These reptiles are made like us, and digest
their food and turn it to foul flesh even as we do ours to sweet; as
well might you think to chew grass by eating of grass-fed beeves, as to
eat cheese by swallowing these uncleanly insects."

Gerard raised his voice in uttering this, and the company received the
paradox in dead silence, and with a distrustful air, like any other
stranger, during which the Burgundian, who understood German but
imperfectly, made Gerard Gallicize the discussion. He patted his
interpreter on the back. "C'est bien, mon gars; plus fin que toi n'est
pas bete," and administered his formula of encouragement; and Gerard
edged away from him; for next to ugly sights and ill odours, the poor
wretch disliked p